Trance in Transit
The meditative quality of sky-watching is brought alongside the beauty of fine design and minimal sculptural form in Ianuae, new work by Ri Williamson.
The look is pale, angular and architectonic. The neutrality of international style architecture discloses views of sky. The sensation though, is of trance in transit. All achieved with a sculptor's sense of ever changing view(point), and the quiet feeling of confinement, still-moving.
The wall units are arctic white, and the screen images sky blue (laced with icy cirrus). The imagery has universal appeal, but it is often reflected or projected light that catches the eye. In Ianuae V for example, the front faces protect a beautiful ambient blue within. And once within, in what is actually an ambiguous and delicious interior space, the palette is warmed yellow - the hue of an LCD screen viewed obliquely.
Ianuae I and II are more direct. I traces a journey from where normally we might feel short-changed - right over the wing. In the New Zealand context, the modernist forms favoured by an architect like Ernst Plischke are recalled by Ianuae II, which really does look like a model home with true blue view.
Ianuae was the Roman god of transit, of passage, and interestingly, of the archway. While frequency and the popular extent of travel are contemporary cultural phenomena, Ri Williamson's career already has an international trajectory about it, with residencies and studio time spent in Beijing, Valencia and Paris. Her scrutiny of transit would have impressed the mythical deity. But what he would have made of Williamson's immaculately powdercoated steel surfaces and discretely confined portable media players, I do not know..... their sense of the timeless and the classical though, would be a good place to start.
Jonathan Smart
Ianuae I
Ianuae II
Inauae III
Ianuae IV
Ianuae V
Ianuae I - V are from 2006
Each is made of powdercoated steel, plus DVD