Anton Parsons 3D Brochure

Anton Parsons Passing Time

9.03.2010 – 18.03.2010 Opening function: Tue 9.03.2010, 6:00pm

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assing Time – the title suggests a melancholy and listlessness reminiscent of Roger Waters’ stream of consciousness lyrics for Pink Floyd’s Time ‘. . . and then one day you find ten years have got behind you’. But in Anton Parsons’ work All the time it is not just a decade but a century which has been scattered across the gallery floor in a field of numbers. Each year marked out in a small block of primary colour and the sans-serif type of Helvetica.

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his depiction of time is one among many within a carefully defined vocabulary of materials and forms that have preoccupied Parsons for the past ten years – from the rectangular protrusions that cling to a single rod, visually jarring and discordant, to elegant sweeps of time with sculptures that fold in on themselves tracing a figure eight, the symbol of infinity.

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ach sculpture is a fastidiously rendered calibration of line, scale, texture, surface sheen and the balance between these. There is also an acute interest in material refinement and industrial processes with structures that exhibit the tensile strength of metal, the smooth polished surfaces of anodised aluminium and the precision of laser-cut vinyl letters and numbers. When the numbers and letters are combined with the flawless construction and paintwork of each metal block they create a kind of technological perfection that we associate with the hard-edges of Minimalism. And yet that minimalist perfection is at odds with the gently evocative titles of the works and the languor associated with the concept of passing time.

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he meanings of the titles, however, are underscored by the letters and numbers yet this information is withheld from us as the words and dates have deliberately been disordered and therefore rendered unintelligible. Like the deconstructed time phrases used to create an endless stream of letters in the work Jumble: time lapse, killing time, signature time, time zone. All the individual letters are still there and, if we care to, we might manage to reconstruct them, but that is not the point. There is content but it doesn’t really matter whether we know exactly what that is. What the works lead us to is a consideration of time, our own time, time spent looking, the seeming linearity of time, an eternity of time.

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n earlier work, the small blocks extending from some of the sculptures equated to the length of a sentence written in Braille. They were not the tiny raised dots of conventional Braille but hard-edged protrusions that jutted out pushing into our subconscious, forcing us to consider the illegibility of the text. In this current exhibition, in the work Myopia, we are again confronted with the indecipherability of Braille mapped out

as a series of small holes drilled into the metal frame. There is the same disruption of meaning in the work Aphasia, where each block records a euphemistic ‘four letter word’ that has been reformatted so that like the Braille it becomes incoherent. Hence the title Aphasia, which is a loss of the ability to articulate ideas, or to comprehend spoken or written language.

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hile the visual noise and disrupted meaning of reconfigured words and numbers occupies our attention, at the centre of each work is a quiet emptiness – the empty space that lies between the blocks scattered on the floor, the cut-out emptiness of the black stainless steel frames, the space demarcated by the curving arcs of the larger sculptures, and at a more intense register the small enclosed spaces at the centre of each block and each column.

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f we consider, as the artist invites us to, these empty vessels with their disrupted syntax as a kind palimpsest, over which we can write our own thoughts, then the forms and text reorder themselves in our minds into a multitude of individual associations. It is this that is the key to the works, they are there for us to apply our own history and experiences. We need only know a little of what these works represent, as too much precludes us from exploiting our own thoughts.

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need to keep the works open is why Parsons has used Helvetica type. While it is considered the quintessential typeface of the twentieth century and it epitomises modernism, it is also renowned for its neutrality and lack of inflection. It is the most rational of type faces and more than any other it invites open interpretation – it can be whatever you want it to be. In works like All the time, for example, where each block is inscribed with a single year, the minimalism of the form and the uninflected type provide an openness and therefore the possibility of individual memories associated with that year. So these works become a kind of personal history painting or a portrait in numbers representing the milestones of life, of time served, experienced, remembered and relived.

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he numbers, the letters and the Braille can be whatever we want them to be, whatever they might suggest to us in the stream of consciousness of our own memories is as valid as the piece of text from which they were originally devised.

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hese are the threads of Parsons’ practice over the last decade, brought together to create a cohesive whole, with each new work adding weight to the consistency of the ideas, reinforcing notions of openness, of the impossibility of time, the personal experience that we bring to every work and the difficulty of defining history.

Kriselle Baker , January 2010

above Jumble 2010 anodised aluminium 2400mm x 1800mm x 1800mm Front cover All The Time (detail) 2010 aluminium, lacquer, vinyl 300mm x 150mm x 150mm each

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