About
COMMA, the successful series of fast paced exhibitions, continues at Bloomberg SPACE with newly commissioned works by artists Naheed Raza and Jedediah Caesar.
Sculptor and filmmaker Naheed Raza has been commissioned to create a new short film titled Sand. Shot at the edge of The Empty Quarter in Saudi Arabia, Sand is a meditation on the strange, silent power of the desert. The transience, mobility and immersive quality of the shifting sand acts as a metaphor not only for time but also relates to thresholds of seeing, thinking and being.
The film dwells both on the peculiar nature of sand itself - which has baffled artists and scientists alike because of its unusual physical properties, between that of a solid and liquid - and also on our physical relationship with this material which is so fine, yet has the capacity to overwhelm us.
The piece references works such as Hiroshi Teshigahara's Woman of the Dunes, J G Ballard's Drought City and Ralph Bagnold's Travels in a Dead World as well as the very real problem of escalating desertification. In the absence of commentary, projected on an immense scale in the front gallery and with its intense focus on âpure materiality', Sand presents us with a hypnotic vision of an unstable world.
For COMMA, Jedediah Caesar has been commissioned to create two new works. On entering the rear gallery visitors will be presented with one of his characteristic cut-resin multi-panelled wall sculptures. Since 2003, Caesar has been engaged in making sculptural installations made from a unique amalgamation of clear or coloured resin, found objects and detritus. The resulting blocks are then cut to reveal a sequence of often legible petrified matter.
For his COMMA commission Caesar will move away from his previous stacked arrangement of rectangular blocks to experiment with a sculpture created from a cast within a large wicker basket. Resembling slices of geodes, he will place these rounded cut-resin blocks in diminishing rows directly against the wall in the rear gallery. Scanning across the wall, the viewer can follow the embedded objects from one cross-sectioned tile to the next as if reading the frames in a film. Similar to the animated shifts between film stills, the pattern of these panels appears to repeat, but each one deviates subtlety from the next.
In response to the particular architecture of the rear gallery at Bloomberg SPACE Caesar will also create a series of casts installed along, and restricting access to, the balcony space. At an external location in London, Caesar will excavate and cast a series of shallow pits to echo the exact dimensions of the balcony gallery. The resulting inverted particle-encrusted relief sculptures can be viewed from several vantage points both in the gallery and from the glass walled-offices above, creating a multiplicity of readings of the work as a horizon, a glyph and an architectural intervention. Caesar's work recalls Minimalism's interest in the methods of industry, yet demonstrates a particular relationship to his surroundings, incorporating materials from the outside world into his sculptures, which in turn become an exploded object and a recording of a particular space.
