Charlie Jeffery
Approaching the entrance to ‘Why Stand When You Can Fall’, Charlie Jeffery’s solo show at Le Quartier centre d’art contemporain de Quimper, viewers were confronted by a wall that split their vision, creating an image of two identical spaces containing installations, each nearly mirroring the other. Such divisions and near-identical doublings proliferated throughout the exhibition, which included videos, photographs, wall texts and sculptures, many of which Jeffery reconfigured and recontextualized for this show. An English artist based in Paris, Jeffery employs a low-tech aesthetic using readily available objects and materials upon which he imposes logical and/or physical pressures that push his works towards a point of instability, whereby they seem ready to tip over and become something else.
The words How to Make Yourself Double (2011), scribbled on a piece of scrap paper, established the ongoing theme of the fission of unified identities. A nearby chair (Block Chair, 2011) invited the viewer to sit facing a wall text instructing him or her to Concentrate the Mind on Something, Think About Something Else (2011), a mental feat that would require a split personality disorder. The artist himself has often taken on the alter ego of a donkey in performances and videos. In Donkey Work (2008), a video divided between two upside-down screens on opposite sides of the bisected room, Jeffery, wearing a donkey mask and a business suit, savagely chops up office furniture with an axe.
In the works on view here, it was not only individuals but also everyday objects and materials that were bifurcated and thereby lost their fixed identities or functions. Certainly no individual could find a comfortable position in the series of conjoined wooden chair frames in Distrust Everybody, Lie on the Floor (2011). Unlike Sol LeWitt’s series of ‘Incomplete Open Cubes’ (1974), which these referenced, Jeffery’s permutations push the system out of equilibrium, inducing anomalous transformations that deviate from their original model. Caught in a state of perpetual rearrangement, the chairs seemed on the verge of mutating out of control. Inaccurate Models of Other Things (2001), a shelf displaying agglomerations of geological materials such as dirt, wood and stone, were indeed not accurate models of anything: combinations that arise from them depend on modulation and aggregation, not similitude. For example, to produce one of the objects on the shelf, Jeffery submerged hot oil in cold water to transform it into wax, inducing an elemental transition from liquid to solid. The series titled ‘Different Liquid Substances’ (2010–11) comprised randomly shattered sheets of coloured Perspex, another solid substance that was once a liquid, forming sculptures that allude to the emergent process of crystallization.
In the final rooms of the exhibition, Jeffery constructed a hallway that again split off into two spaces of the same size and shape. In one room, another Block Chair (2011) faced a wall text that asked What Happens When Everything is Gone? (2011), asking us to question a future where the past would no longer exist. In the second room, the past continuously surged forward into a future open to change. In the sound installation The Violent Past (2011) a voice repeated the words ‘the violent past’, which the artist recorded from a BBC report and edited so that the word ‘past’ ended at a slightly different point with each iteration. Through these cuts in the cycle, Jeffery suggests that history is neither linear nor closed. Showing that we can slip out of stable states into new systems has political import; for, as the show’s title suggested, united we stand, but divided we will fall, and possibly, into less fixed, more open scenarios.
