Solo exhibition by Ariel Reichman
waterside contemporary, 2014
Through film, photography, drawing and installation, Reichman’s practice explores a paradoxical space between the poetic and the political, retaining a sense of innocence and childlike conviction with which to critically observe its institutional surroundings.
The exhibition itself rejects the perimeter of the gallery, leaving all walls empty. A central, purpose-built structure houses Secret Performance (I have to be strong), in which the artist tries to operate a wind-up torch to provide light for the duration of a reel of 16mm film, struggling to sustain the action and himself remaining obscure.
Images appear at once metaphor and figurative, and it is often not clear whether we are looking in or out. Using modest means and forms, the artist places his viewers near a boundary, a physical, ideological or emotional structure. Electric Fence, a series of photographs consisting of a single continuous white line that is at first difficult to identify, withdraws into seductive abstraction with ease. All the same, the image reproduces stark and unforgiving conditions – negation, invisibility, permanence.
