FILIATION
Tintype gallery, London 2014
“The everyday: that which we never see for the first time but can only see again.”
Maurice Blanchot
Sofie Grevelius translates moments in the urban landscape that surprise and play with our attention. Through photography, print and sculpture, she builds a roaming barometer of what she calls ‘wonk’ situations; conditions/circumstances that do not sit still and that unsettle the organised structures that surround us.
Grevelius makes objects that are both a response and a retort to the many shapes, forms and colours that animate and demarcate our built environment – road markings, scaffolding, building facades, ventilations systems, signage, pipes and physical fixtures such as railings and doors. By a process of subtle modification, she turns these everyday reference points into something more elusive and perplexing: “…the more you pare things down or simplify an expression, the more complicated and open to interpretation it becomes. This is a paradox I enjoy working with – a complicated simplicity.”
Through acts of mimicry and transformation into basic colour and shape, Grevelius develops visual correlations of filation – dependency, connection, branches from the same root. The way for instance, that blue and white covered scaffolding has an affiliation with the ubiquitous blue and white striped plastic bag. How much is chance, how much is carefully considered? “Recently I’ve become concerned with trust, especially in relation to power. I want to investigate what effects our surroundings have on us, what does it mean to lean or rely on something? How can a yellow box create structure?”
A publication, ROAD WORKS by Sofie Grevelius, accompanies the exhibition. This is a collection of street photographs that Grevelius has been taking for the last four years. The images have both a direct and an indirect relationship to the work made in the show – recurrent leitmotifs, a fascination with the chance encounter, playful sightings, the casual beauty of the everyday.
