Jessica Warboys’ solo commission is the first in Cell Project Space’s CYcLORAMA series. Warboys utilises a range of media within her practice, including: film, painting and performance. Materials are often partnered with a natural element, such as the sea or the sun. The landscape becomes a place for making, performance and film making. In her ‘Sea paintings’ Warboys submerges large canvases into the sea before and after applying pigment directly onto its surface. The action itself is closely linked to performance, with the traces of movements revealing the action of making and the strength of the environment. Hung or suspended, engulfing or opening the space, Warboys chooses not to stretch the canvas, but to retain the freedom to respond to the gallery, maintaining a continuous and open-ended approach to its interpretation and installation. This approach to painting related to both performance and gestural improvisation, is akin to the way Warboys makes her video works, in which narrative is gradually revealed.
VICTORY PARK TREE PAINTING will incorporate Warboys’ ‘Trilogy’, first exhibited at Le Crédac, Ivry-sur-Seine, Paris, earlier this year. The Trilogy presents 3 individual works filmed between the summer of 2010 and Winter 2011, beginning in La forêt de Fontainebleau, France and finishing in London’s Victoria Park. Footage of London’s oldest public park ‘Victoria Park’ currently undergoing re-landscaping, places at its centre the ‘Old English Garden’. The park, both subject and space for performance - indirectly functions as an unofficial archive of how the park once was.
On entering the space, an excerpt of medieval poet, Marie de France’s XII and final Lai: Eliduc is heard as a voice-over accompanying the moving image. Partially unintelligible, due to the Anglo-Norman form – the narration guides the viewer through the shifting scenes. The film culminates in a print being taken from a pool of marbled oil paint, a print on fabric, which was once the curtain - this painterly image proposes both a momentary illumination of her poetry, a portrait of Marie de France or more possibly the waking of Eliduc’s muse.
The marbled ‘print’ from ‘Marie de France’, the film print, the impression of nature found in the sea-paintings all emphasize the importance of ‘record’ – with performance being positioned between event and conclusion, regardless of the medium.
Curator Milika Muritu
Props and paintings guide the narration of the films informing their structure. An example being La forêt de Fontainebleau’s stained glass hoop, which is at once a window and a frame within the landscape – where filmic space and time is opened, separated and reconfigured. The formal structure of painting/sculptures such as Tree Painting, Clan and Trunk echo the edit of films – in particular La forêt de Fontainebleau where time, gravity and space proceed to become twisted, reversed and re-orientated. Clan, can be seen to tightly mirror the closing image of Victory Park where two pairs of golden-gloved hands clasp one another, suggesting a knot or a loop - confirming the end of the trilogy and a potential return to the beginning.
Jessica Warboys simultaneously works between London and Paris and has had solo exhibitions ‘Parasol’, 2009 at Galerie Gaudel De Stampa, Paris and more recently ‘No More Summer of Incompleteness’, 2011 at Sutton Lane, London. Since graduating from ‘The Slade School of Art’ in 2004 she has attended a residency at ‘Frac des Pays de la Loire’ 2010-2011 and more recently a residency and solo exhibition 'Underlap' on Stromboli, Sicily as part of "Volcano Extravaganza" a project by Fiorucci Art Trust, curated by Milovan Farronato with Rita Selvaggio. VICTORY PARK TREE PAINTING’ will be her most recent commission in London after live/film event, ‘Ballad of the Green Hoop’, at the South London Gallery, curated by Anne-Sophie Dinant 2010. Other solo exhibitions this year include ‘Land & Sea’, Le Crédac, Paris and "A l’étage", Satellite 4, Jeu de Paume, at Maison d’art Bernard Anthonioz, Paris curated by Raimundas Malasauskas, recent group exhibtions include 'Tableaux' Le Magasin, Centre National d'Art Contemporain, Grenoble curated by Yves Aupetitallot & Vincent Honoré, and 'Madam Realism', Marres, Centre for Contemporary Culture, curated by Lisette Smits, Maastricht
supported by The Arts Council of England
