Mia Enell Subspaces,November 2018
A watchful eye, a blue stare, like a protective “Evil Eye” talisman in a welcoming home of the Mediterranean East. A blue pearl in a pale oyster with glistening contours. A flying saucer, aloft in a dark night.
Eye. I. You. U. F. O. Oyster. The world is my… This world. That world.
UFOyster, 2016, is the first work upon entering Mia Enell’s exhibition, Subspaces. With it, the artist gives us early clues to her practice: sleights of hand and slips of the tongue, a dialectic where language guides the thought that prompts the word. “Everyday” objects take on magical, surrealist dimensions.
Enell’s paintings and drawings are deeply rooted in dreams. Like the surrealists before her, the artist creates layered spaces and stratified worlds, tied to the psychological realm and driven by free-associations. This may be a reason why drawing in particular plays a central role in her practice. It is the medium of immediacy, most intimately connecting the psyche to the paper and to the viewer. Through her drawings the artist translates her experience of the world into images, words or scribbled captions, and symbolism. In Burrows, 2016, she has repeatedly drawn a dozen heads emerging from the earth, only slightly, or deepening into hiding, under cover, negotiating their level of exposure to the world. Each oblong vignette, composed of a cover over someone staring straight ahead, also resembles an eye. Each is floating on the page, and it is hard to draw a relationship among them, either in space or in intent. Do they follow a rhythm, a pattern? Are each related to the others in their fear and anxiety?
While the creation process in Enell’s work is tied to dreams and the meandering of the mind, it is not disconnected from our present. “Strange is part of the work,” she recently told me. And strange is indeed part of our daily lives, the unfamiliar, the extraordinary, ill-fitting, along with a desire to burrow at times, to escape, to disassociate, to stop the rapid flow of time; just like in the odd (strange) still moments she depicts.
Enell’s work often recalls that of artists such as Nancy Spero, Louise Bourgeois, Francesco Clemente, Bruce Nauman, or Marcel Dzama. Like hers, their practices often rest on the relationships of the word and the image, side by side; and connect the artist’s inner domain, body and mind, to the imperfect world they inhabit. They are bound together by kinship rather than historical lineage.
Perhaps because both her parents were artists, lineage is an uneasy notion for Enell. Kinship is more comfortable. When discussing lineage, the artist commonly refers to a seminal moment she experienced as child, maybe four or five years old, during a visit of S.M.A.K in Ghent, Belgium, with her a parents. At the museum, she encountered Panamarenko’s Krokodillen, 1967, an installation of cardboard, cellophane, and plastic tiles shaped into an octagonal basin. In this dry, makeshift pool divided in two, lie three crocodiles, each made up of sand and stones in plastic, wrapped in fishing net. Panamerenko’s transformation of materials was meant to convey his own childhood memories of visiting the zoo in nearby Antwerp, and it must have seemed like magic to a child Enell’s age.
While she grew up in the painting studio of her parents, Krokodillen was her first own “art memory.” A beginning. The work’s symbolism is seminal to the practice, of course, but there is also a sense of perspective and inner geometry that can be traced back to this installation and that remains in Enell’s paintings today. It is a viewing mechanism that she has successfully translated to two-dimensions, like in the collapsed perspective of OFF, 2017. If it grew out of that early memory in Ghent, it gained momentum in the 1990s, when subject matter was directly under an artist’s nose (the “everyday”), and much of painting was flat (Michael Craig-Martin, Alex Katz, Marlene Dumas).
In OFF, we see a protagonist who seems to levitate over a carpet. Yet, if we understand Enell’s composition in an absence of spatial perspective, and in reference to Panamarenko’s Krokodillen, the split of the work in halves activates a specific viewing mechanism. The two planes are independent of each other; like windows into two distinct worlds, each with a different object (one crocodile, two crocodiles; one flying carpet, one flying man), and connected only by our own desire to connect. Composition in medieval painting carried a similar type of relational perspective, where size referred to place along social or religious hierarchy rather than one’s place in space. Today, composition on the digital screen is likewise articulated in a series of windows brought “forth” and “backwards” on a flat plane, depending on the relationships the reader desires.
To look at Enell’s work is to be in communion with her; an intimate if somewhat abstract experience. The viewer shares in the artist’s desire to connect thoughts of the world and of the mind; ours and hers; building meaning through juxtapositions in a different type of perspective.
Renaud Proch
Renaud Proch is Independent Curators International (ICI)’s Executive Director, and from 2009 to 2013, he served as ICI’s Deputy Director. Prior to this he was Senior Director at the Project in New York, as well as Director of MC, in Los Angeles. Originally from Switzerland, Proch studied in London, and moved to the West Coast of the U.S. in 2001. He co-founded ART2102 of Los Angeles in 2003, a non-profit organization that realized projects by artists and curators on- and off-site; and the backroom in 2005, an evolving archive of artists’ source materials and itinerant research project presented in five cities in the U.S., Mexico and France. In 2011, he co-curated with Khwezi Gule a retrospective of South African artist Tracey Rose for the Johannesburg Art Gallery, South Africa, and the Umea Bildmuseet, Sweden, which also traveled to the Nikolaj Kunsthal, in Copenhagen, Denmark.