Locked Room Scenario: press coverage
The Daily Telegraph, 30 August 2011
Evening Standard, 18 August 2011:
"Imagine a by-appointment-only exhibition for which, once you've booked your ticket, you might be one of the visitors to receive a text requesting that you meet a stranger who will escort you to the venue.
"Then, when you arrive at the exhibition, the building is open but the show appears to be closed. As you walk around the edges of the inaccessible room, hints of video projections and sculptures can be glimpsed through frosted and wire-meshed windows, and gaps between blinds, and overheard through the walls. Then, when you leave the exhibition and make your way through the surrounding streets, it appears that you are being followed. What's going on? What does it all mean?
"Locked Room Scenario, an installation by British artist Ryan Gander, opens at the end of the month and is set to be one of most talked-about events of the year." (Ben Luke - read full article)
The Daily Telegraph, 30 August 2011:
"I won’t bore you with the plot. Suffice it to say that you should pay attention to whatever works of art are partially visible, the postcard carousel in the shop, a pile of unopened letters and packages addressed to one of the artists, a tip at the side of the building, two messages spray-painted on an outside wall, and a ringing mobile. Be sure to go round to the rear of the gallery and look through the window. Oh, and if you find a seating plan for the opening night dinner on the floor, study it.
"The idea is not new: we’ve seen something like it in works by Gregor Schneider, Mike Nelson, Robert Wilson and the theatre company Punchdrunk. It is what Gander does with the form that’s so original. In the title Field of Meaning, he gives us a clue, not to solving the mystery but regarding the question: what importance do we accord to meaning or content in modern art, and where is it to be found? In contemporary art, there is always a struggle between the artist and the viewer to determine meaning. Initially, the artist is always in control.
"To find the solution to the puzzle, Gander makes us crawl on all fours, peer into smelly lavatories, pick our way through a rubbish-strewn tip, and stare in frustration at locked doors and inaccessible spaces. But how do we know he hasn’t sent us on a wild goose chase? Or that we haven’t been lied to and misdirected? But at a certain point, the balance of power moves from artist to viewer. Our need for rational explanations is so powerful that we create meaning whether the creator put it there or not." (Richard Dorment - read full article)
Playground, 30 August 2011:
"I have to admit, I was intrigued by this show. The detective work began before I even got there, my Poirot moustache in place, I googled the name from the flyer, 'Mary Aurory' finding a single youtube video, my intrigue increased. Characteristically frustrating, it offers a glimpse of the words 'MARY AURORY SORRY' spray-painted onto a wall in an unidentifiable European city. I expect Gander had something to do with this. If I were him, I would sit back like Ebenezer Scrooge counting the youtube hits as they increase over the duration of the show, (as I write it stands at 46) breathing a sigh of satisfaction.
"The press release hypothesises that the show might be over, but I don't believe that for a second; the pungent smell of newly-laid carpet pervades the space and the blue velvet sausages hanging limply between the barrier posts are glinting with a never-been-touched glow. The Tate-style timeline is pasted to the wall, and the laser-cut lettering listing the artists names is intact, an imaginary Situationist group show; a knowing nod from Gander to the Situationist's trend of constructed environments in relation to his own joy in fakery." (Lauren Godfrey - read full article)
The Times, 31 August 2011:
"Gander is tapping in here to that dangerous animal trait, curiosity. There is nothing more annoying or intriguing than a locked room. What's behind the door? What's around that corner, where I can see just the edge of a mass of blue fur? What does this message mean, scribbled to an artist on the back of a painting, dimly visible in the half-light, some of the letters ringed in red? Why is that death announcement circled on The Times newspaper page that covers another window?
"This is a creepy experience - the corridors are dark, almost too dark to see in places; you feel your way along walls half-carpeted with dense blue shagpile in an eerie quiet, broken only by the "schlick" of a slide projector and the ghostly soundtrack of a looping video piece, left on, presumably, by the same slovenly invigilator who left the crumpled packet of Gitanes and a dog-eared copy of Le Monde just inside one of the doors." (Nancy Durrant - purchase access to article)
Time Out, 6 September 2011:
"The most interesting aspect to author William Boyd's fake 1998 biography of American artist Nat Tate was not that the work was successfully presented as fact when Tate was a complete fiction. It was that there were people in the artworld who admitted to having known him. How much of that was a genuine belief (albeit faulty) that they might have actually met him is another interesting question. The mind can be highly open to suggestion and memory can be alarmingly unreliable."
"[...] The odd thing is that in spite of the fact that, like Nat Tate, Gander's Blue Conceptualists are also all fictional, like art detectives, we piece together all this information about them (and the more closely you look, the more of it you'll find) until our imagination forms it into a plausible back story. It may be based in fantasy but like reading a good novel it allows you to imagine an alternative reality that's detailed and multi-layered enough to merge with your own." (Helen Sumpter - read article)