Cerith Wyn Evans

For his exhibition at the ICA, Cerith Wyn Evans has stripped away the wall that hides the gallery from the outside world. The removal of the outside wall means that windows are exposed so that the passer-by can look in and, reciprocally, the gallery-goer can gaze onto the Mall. Symbolically this gaze is extended to Westminster, Buckingham Palace, Downing Street. Acting as an homage to Broodthaers’ 1975 exhibition of the same name, the gesture of Décor leaves the room otherwise empty and in doing so mutes it, leaving the viewer with a strange, sad sense of intrusion and solitude. 

In an equal and opposite gesture, Take my eyes and through them see you, shows is two four minute looped 35 mm films projected as part of an installation. One of the films is black, the other white. Otherwise they are blank; the room is filled with grand whirr of the projector yet the films themselves show nothing.     

Across the hall, Title Withheld, features window blinds snapping open and shut, relaying a message out to the streets and back to the gallery in Morse code. Their message is dense esoteric text about astro-photography; even written it is essentially incomprehensible. Through the opening and closing of the blinds it serves as a filter; alternately obscuring and revealing the view of the outside world. Here and throughout this exhibition, by means of a coherent series concealments and disclosures, Wyn Evans shows space in a new light and in a fuller, historical and geographical, context. More though, he manages this not with a haranguing argument or noisy didacticism, but with a series of poetic gestures that ask silent questions.

RL