Little Deaths

Opened by Dr Edward Colless on
Wednesday 18th of August at 6pm

Exhibition Dates 3rd August - 29th August, 2010

418 Bay Street, Port Melbourne
+61 3 9681 8245 rsvp@marsgallery.com.au
www.marsgallery.com.au
Open Tuesday - Sunday, 10 - 5pm

The Kiss

Pushing against the limits

By Sanné Mestrom

I encountered Tino Sehgals Kiss on a recent visit to the Guggenheim earlier this year. Looking down from atop the spiraled rotunda I saw two people – a man and a woman – moving around on the ground floor in a slow, erotic embrace.

Seghal’s Kiss is a sculptural and performative work in which two people move in “slow-motion” through a prescribed choreography. Kissing and touching, they eventually come to resemble embracing couples from historical paintings. Both familiar (personally and art historically) and yet clearly constructed, Kiss immediately draws viewers into a subtle engagement with their own experience of intimacy. (1)

The kiss is an enduring theme throughout the history of art and yet comes into play in Bill Sampson’s work not as a romantic gesture, but - similar to Seghal’s work - as a lived moment in time. The moment when consciousness gives way to the unnamable psychological intensities of a private encounter.

In LITTLE DEATHS there are no representational forms, and yet there is still something very familiar about them – there is a tension, a pressure, a pushing as the forms on the paper press outward towards it’s edges, doubling up and compressing until there is no where else for them to go. It’s like anything where - no matter how good - sometimes you reach the limits of a place, of a time, or a love – and there is nothing left to do but fold inwards and coalesce or cut loose and move on.

Produced in a pool of paint and framed by the limits of the papers edge, the forms in Sampson’s works push themselves further and further outward until they are – quite literally – painted into a corner. This prevailing element in the process of these works embodies their very meaning. As Sampson states,

“[While the process] is inherently chaotic, its order is governed by its physics, albeit of such complexity we understand only perhaps the general principals… So as I endeavor to have my way with the bath of paint, to fulfill my desires, to reveal the longing, it works religiously to fail, deflect and contain those intensions – compelling them to conform to its environment into which they were born. The bath contains an absolute intelligence within which my best efforts are contained.”

Without the intrinsic limits of this framing devise, moving forever outward the forms of these works threaten to envelop all that it encounters.

Winter, Melbourne, 2010
Sanné Mestrom

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1. Furthermore, what is of great interest to me is that Seghals Kiss cannot be readily obtained. He states, ‘What interested me in [Kiss] was that it was a way of producing something and nothing at the same time.’ The MCA’s (Chicago) acquisition of Sehgal’s Kiss included a mandate that no documentation of the artwork/performance was allowed (the image we’re looking at on the right is a “remake” of the original, an image beyond copyright that I lifted off the internet).

Download original 1.2MB catalogue here