Tintype Gallery, London, 10 March – 13 April 2017
Marion Coutts, Aiming or Hitting, installation view. Image courtesy the artist and Tintype.
Tucked in an alcove at the back of the gallery is a cluster of drawings, one of which, in a shaky, pale blue hand, simply spells out the words Actual Size (all works 2017). In the context of ‘Aiming or Hitting’, Marion Coutts’s first solo show since 2008, the pointless tautology appears as a gentle reminder to try and focus on the world as it is, a reassurance that everything has its own scale. The exhibition’s careful photographs, sparse drawings and slight sculptural installations evince a sense of hesitant detachment: a wandering eye and sense of curiosity, tempered with a deliberate step back, a wary distance. In the main room of the gallery, Curtain is a line of black vinyl strips that runs from shoulder height to the floor, bisecting half the room like odd, funereal party streamers. Two rounded pieces of chalkboard occupy the opposite wall, each shaped like the conjoined circular outline of an image as seen through a pair of binoculars. There are no ghosts of words or remnants of anything ever having been written on them, just the residual faint lines of chalk that always stays behind when you try to to wipe a chalkboard clean. This deliberate blankness sets the tone for the whole show, while the work’s title gives us our stage instructions of where to remain: The Middle Distance. Continue reading
Chris Fite-Wassilak 