PRESENTATION: Emily Wardill-Hourless And At Large
Emily Wardill’s works are best known for their sensual and psychologically charged refracted narratives. Wardill’s films, photographic works, drawings, and props investigate the complexities of communication and representation, the limitations and imprecision of language, and the point at which the immaterial adopts the material through insinuation.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Casa São Roque Archive
For her solo show “Hourless and at large”, Emily Wardill presents works from fourteen years ago to the present day – reflecting on connections and dissonances within them and the role that the imaginary plays in our relationship to the material world. “Game Keepers without Game” (2009) is presented alongside her last film work “Night for Day” (2020), both of which use the conjecture of family to talk about generational shifts in ideology and the strange two-way membrane between ourselves and the objects modelled in our image. “Night for Day” uses the fake relationship between a mother and a son to think about what would happen if a communist revolutionary gave birth to a techno utopian, if gender as performitivity was thought through the lens of women making the political decision to live clandestinely in Portugal for a larger part of the 20th century and if the “Last Woman” were the fem bot from The Tales of Hoffman. Comprised of interviews conducted with Isabel do Carmo, who co-ran the Revolutionary Brigades in Portugal that helped to overthrow the longest fascist dictatorship in Europe and two young men Alexander Bridi and Djelal Osman – astrophysicists running a startup in Lisbon that attempts to programme computers to recognise moving images- the film collages a subjectivity from fragments of camera’s struggling to see at night, out in the cold presences watching families inside their homes and images that attempt to describe a loved one in frequencies of three. Their imaginary house is the real family home of the late architect António Teixeira Guerra, finished just before 1974, designed in the shape of a triangle and shot at the time he always chose to invite guests – the magic hour – when day either becomes night or night becomes day. Stretching this influence into the architecture of Casa São Roque, Wardill litters objects around that fluctuate between being props, status symbols, evidence of crime and fictitious remains. Executed specially for this exhibition, a new commission “Sleep Patterns and Musical Chairs” (2023) takes the imaginary of the nation state – projecting the patterns that car headlights make on our ceiling at night across three of the rooms whilst woozy musical interpretations of anthems bleed in through the walls (played on the piano by Daniel Bernardes). The architecture of Casa São Roque becomes a part of the piece through these accidental moving highlights. Through the walls is “Through the Walls” a series of relief sculptures. Titled after the names given to origami sculptures, they are three dimensional objects that want to be part of the wall rather than to stand in the room. The pieces make connections between the folds that occur in freshly opened shirts and the folds in origami – that other empty three dimension form faked from two dimensional paper. Their absent presence feeds from the fact that clothes are always flat until we fill them with our bodies and walk them around. The reliefs look as though they are pushing through the walls – like ghosts or virtual renderings of things that didn’t respect the normal boundaries of physical reality. In the series “Children or Animals” frames don’t respect the boundaries of conventional framing – just as walls can be passed through as though they were digital. “I gave my love a cherry that had no stone” (2016) was filmed with a drone that was pretending to be human and a human pretending to be a drone. It takes us into the body of the dancer David Marques which has become indistinguishable from a digital body and who moves through space as though he were CGI (computer-generated imagery).
Photo: Emily Wardill, Night for Day, Installation view, Secession-Vienna, 2020, Photo: Iris Ranzinger, © Emily Wardill
Info: Curator: Barbara Piwowarska, Casa São Roque – Centro de Arte , Rua São Roque da Lameira 2092, Porto, Portugal, Duration: 19/2-30/9/2023, Days & Hours: Daily 13:30-19:00, (October-March) or 13:30-20:00 (April-September), www.casasroque.art/
