29 October to 20 November 2005
Thursday - Sunday 12 noon to 5pm
Press Release
Ensemble - a mime for two players uncovers a largely forgotten part of our cultural history to mine themes of aspiration and fallibility. It is a two screen video projection of a performance on two self-playing organs. These organs were built for public performance in the days before the prevalence of recorded music; each incorporates an array of instruments playing tunes punched into cards. Though they attempt to replace a full orchestra, their clunky nature leaves a conspicuous gap between ambition and reality.
Stella Capes has the two organs play the popular wartime tune ‘Roses of Picardy.’ Each is allocated a verse, with both instruments attempting to come together for the chorus. While individually the instruments can pass muster, playing in unison the flaws in their method become ever more heightened. The video is one long, un-edited, real-time performance made possible through an organised team of people operating each organ.
What results is an awkward, slightly embarrassing, but nevertheless graceful attempt to accomplish the impossible. The effort to achieve this human expression is of utmost importance; the awkward failure to succeed is at its essence.
Much of Capes’ work concerns itself with the effort expended in pursuit of unrealisable aims. It offers a view of the world as one in which failure is seemingly inevitable, but is transcended by the persistence of hope and human endeavour.
Stella Capes (b.1978) is an artist living in London. She trained at the Royal College of Art, has just completed the Cocheme Fellowship at Byam Shaw School of Art, and has recently exhibited in Peculiar Encounters, John St., London, Immediate 3, Site Gallery, Sheffield, Under 5’s, 39 Gallery, London and Portobello Film Festival, London.
You are in a gallery, but have not left the magic and wonder of the everyday world behind. Stella Capes aspires to capture and re-present those fleeting and transitory moments of perception, imagination and wonder that lend shape and colour to experience. This may be mundane and monochrome or Technicolor and phantasmagorical. Her production may take the form of sculptural objects, film, video, installation, performance, photography or a confluence of the above. In every case I have witnessed, Capes' art is profoundly marked by a lightness of touch equal in register to the ephemeral though no less wondrous magic of the moment produced.
The making and experience of art is itself a product of an ensemble expressed as a mime for two players. On one side is the artist who is engaged in something of a mime before the object of their art; on the other stand the receiver, viewer and audience who, in an ideal situation, is equally engaged and as active in the production. Such a communicative relationship is necessarily structured as much by failure as it is by the potential for success. You might relate to Stella as a witness who is gently calling our attention to that which we each have seen and experienced in a passing moment when imagination and reality are bound in their organic unity.
For me, Capes' art - at once beautifully poetic and at times pathetically funny - plumbs the very human and thus vaudevillian depths of our everyday experiences structured by both magic and loss. We are frail and fallible - as likely to fall on our faces or even disappear without leaving much of a trace as anything else. Her work reminds me that the art of living is about the effort made over and above the ultimate outcome. Every failure lends the possibility of a success.
John Slyce
Stella Capes
Ensemble
a mime for two players
London