Alice Channer Shows First Solo Scottish Exhibition at the Mackintosh Gallery
GLASGOW.- For GI Festival 2010, The Glasgow School of Art is showing Inhale, Exhale – the first Scottish solo exhibition of London based artist Alice Channer whose work has been created to fit the Mackintosh Gallery, aiming to clothe the physical space as if it were a person.
Alice Channer, ‘Inhale, Exhale’. Photo: Ross Fraser McLean
Channer’s works often take the form of concentrations of material, particularly fabric, which she pleats, stretches and folds. Through exhibitions, she explores the potential for places to have the feeling of being inhabited, paralleling the way clothes are worn on the body. Inhale, Exhale will in essence ‘clothe’ Mackintosh’s work, moving with it in some places, and away from it in others. As the gallery is part of Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s architectural masterwork, with the style and features of a museum, Channer will use the immediate and intimate time of the worn garment in an attempt to make her own and Mackintosh’s works exist in the present.
In the last year, Alice Channer has had two works bought by the Tate Collection and recent solo exhibitions include Worn-work, The Approach, London (2009), I have been unable to borrow the template of Big Ben, Punctuation program, Limoncello, London (2009) and That Make Up Some Things, Associates Gallery, London (2007).
Artist Alice Channer says of Inhale, Exhale: “I have approached this exhibition as a two person show, with my work complimenting and moving with that of Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s. The exhibition title ‘Inhale, Exhale’ refers to a phenomenon in the work where it expands and contracts – as static forms repeat themselves, they change and move. The aperture they make opens and closes from one object to the next. This is a process that mirrors the dilation and contraction of the paired organs of my body, especially my eyes and lungs.
The individual works are not, as is to be expected from figurative sculpture, bodies themselves or equivalents for bodies. Instead, in ‘Inhale, Exhale’, the body is everywhere that the work is not. The body becomes the beams, banisters, floor, ceiling, walls and volume of Mackintosh’s gallery.”
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