Opening reception: Thursday, May 22, 2014, 6-8pm
Lora Reynolds is pleased to announce I would like to invite the viewer, a project-room exhibition comprising a virtual reality experience and three drawings by Susan Collis. This is the artist’s third solo presentation at Lora Reynolds Gallery.
The centerpiece of the exhibition is an immersive visual and aural simulation. In the gallery the viewer sits in a chair directly from Collis’s studio, puts on headphones and a head-mounted display (HMD)—a piece of hardware like a pair of ski goggles fused to a seven-inch video screen—and is transported to a virtual representation of Collis’s studio building in London. The HMD tracks the movements of the viewer’s head in the real world—left, right, up, down—and the image adjusts immediately to make it feel like the viewer is standing at a fixed point in the virtual world, free to look in whatever direction she pleases.
The piece depicts an old factory that has been partitioned into modest studios for creatives. The spaces feel industrial and unpolished. Each scene’s uneventfulness gives weight to its mundane details. I would like to invite the viewer grants unromantic access to the space where Susan Collis produces artwork. In one scene the artist is working quietly at her desk; otherwise, the viewer is alone to explore.
When I would like to invite the viewer concludes and the viewer removes the headset, it becomes apparent that the framed pieces in the gallery are the very same works Collis was working on in the film. Each looks like a painting on a white substrate: a few hasty brushstrokes made with watery, drippy, gray ink. Closer inspection reveals they are actually meticulously rendered pencil drawings masquerading as careless ink paintings.
Susan Collis creates illusions to highlight the overlooked and unseen. In this show these illusions take two forms: tightly executed graphite drawings that at first glance appear to be something they are not and a virtual world that reveals and demystifies Collis’s studio practice. Although this exhibition marks the first time Collis has ventured into video production, her newest work reaffirms her long-standing suggestion that things are more complicated than they initially seem.
Born in 1956 in Edinburgh, Susan Collis lives and works in London. Her work has been exhibited across Europe and the United States for more than ten years. The Torrance Art Museum (California) and the Ikon Gallery (United Kingdom) have recently held solo exhibitions of her work. She has participated in group shows at the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), the Drawing Center (New York), the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, the CENTRALE for contemporary art (Brussels), and the Victoria and Albert Museum (London). Her work is held in the public collections of Le Fonds National d’Art Contemporain (France), the Israel Museum (Jerusalem), the Arts Council Collection (UK), and the Zabludowicz Collection (London), and others.