Deadline for applications is Tuesday 18 February to attend our free art-writing course, in collaboration with Bergen Kunsthall and Office for Contemporary Art Norway. Painted in , this small work shows a spectral door, camouflaged in the hazy colours of the seascape behind it, standing on the shore. The door is slightly ajar; a trademark cotton-wool cloud hangs lazily against the jamb.
The riddle: do we step through it into another world entirely, or do we just end up with the hems of our trousers wet? Perhaps we are already in a room, an inside decorated as an outside; maybe the door leads to the imaginary spaces behind the shutters of our eyes. Houses can be the stuff of dreams, and not necessarily peaceful ones. As Sigmund Freud pointed out, by putting the home heim at the centre of his theory of the uncanny unheimlich , houses are sometimes the strangest, most unnervingly inexplicable places of all.
On the threshold between public and private realms, homes are the sets on and through which we stage various aspects of our own characters, as well as where we play out the interpersonal dramas of our everyday lives — the love stories, farces and occasional tragedies. Interiors tell these stories materially, which is perhaps why artists and curators have so often used them to tell theirs. In recent months, I have been in, or in front of, a number of exhibitions and artworks that have aimed to transport me to a more intimate space than the gallery or museum in which I was standing.
Sometimes the strategy is total, immersive; sometimes the illusion of domestic scale is propped up by the slenderest of architectonic or decorative supports.
Such artworks ask: What makes a room a room? What are the most basic features that can sustain the pretence? And why do we let ourselves be convinced? The staircase is blocked off by a floor-to-ceiling curtain, black but waftily translucent. Three more curtains pass through the other rooms, briefly and unexpectedly dividing the space with their unknown choreography. The curtains are seductive, protective even, but also slightly inconvenient, cutting off conversations and the flow of cocktails as they corral you gently into corners.
