LEVEL

LEVEL was a site-specific exhibition staged at APT Gallery which drew upon my research into cultural phenomena which manifest (empirically and/or psychologically) an uncertain division between land and water/ solid and fluid. The threat of flooding as increasingly a part of a seasonal cycle in our world is one such phenomena.

The installation was developed in response to APT Gallery’s positioning next to Deptford Creek and the continual threat of flooding in the back section of the building (something that is invisible from the front aspect of the building). The gallery itself spans two spaces: the front space, brightly lit with skylights and a glass front and the back space, darker and artificially lit. The installation used this division as a narrative tool to activate a transformed understanding of the gallery floor. The midpoint of the gallery formed a crucial threshold between the two space.

In flood zones, the traces of prior floods is written on its surfaces. This idea formed the impetus for the second intervention in the space. In any exhibition spaces there is a perpetual labour of ‘touching up’ in process in which walls and floors are repainted to efface the prior exhibition. Traces of this exist at the join between wall and floor which, like any water’s edge, produces a weaving of traces back and forth making the edge somewhat indefinite. This became the driving image of the exhibition – both in the graphic motif in the central threshold space and in the more subliminal treatment of the wall edge. Between the middle space and the back space, I ‘lifted’ the edge of the wall incrementally by 4 cm following some of the already existing paint traces along the wall. This produced a strange perceptual effect of making the floor appear thick and giving it a sense of muddy instability.
 
High on the wall at the back of the space a small video was a recording of the flow of water in the actual creek outside – much the same colour as the floor.