ELLA C BERNARD
FREED FROM DESIRE

STYX - HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT

Set around a projected four-cornered street block that one can navigate, the exhibition Freed From Desire by Ella C Bernard at Garage Gallery resembles a stroll through an eerie yet familiar neighborhood. Built as a geographic relief, works spring up within designated spaces, conveying with their presence various perceptions of weight, fluidity, transparency, durability, resistance and fragility. Looking for the liminality of the precise point of balance sustaining an in-between, the artist acts as an alchemist of sorts combining elements of contrasting qualities, which in turn pull in perfectly orchestrated directions.

Ella C Bernard amalgamates objets-trouvés with traditional sculptures, thoroughly processing each final composition. Found materials are transformed and reassembled, cut and covered in red or black paint, while ceramic or concrete sculptures are meticulously crafted from scratch. Instigating questions of effort and efficiency, the artist adopts a counter-intuitive approach, exerting minimal alterations on lightweight materials and favoring the labor-intensive fabrication of heavier substances.

The objects within the exhibition are rooted in Bernard’s observation of the urban social and architectural environments. Long since exceeding the human scale, these systems let slip at times peculiar yet explicit work-arounds, defined by design terminology as adhocist (from latin ad hoc, 'for that') solutions. At various corners, oversized medallions hang oddly while a concrete fountain crowned with a ceramic sculpture and adorned by a skirt of plastic bins stands in a puddle of water. Further down, painted cardboard compositions lean casually on walls, and assembled installations of diverse rests of construction materials are suspended from the ceilings. At the rear, in what seems an underground passageway, a closed-circuit pipe structure emerges from a poured concrete bed, resonating with tangible sounds of veiled sources.

Adhocism, as coined by Charles Jencks, often relies on improvisation to bypass rigid bureaucratic structures and achieve a goal quicker and more efficiently. For Bernard, ad hoc quick fixes we see on buildings or construction sites involving adhesive tape, plastic wraps, cardboard, partial painting, or visible pipes appear in fact as recent human traces inscribed within the spatio-temporal architectural landscape. These haptic gestures emerge as energetic disruptions outside of the conventional system, evoking uncanny sensations, as a reminder of the spontaneity of human decisions. Subverting the authoritarian structure, these clues feel akin to hacking a code, providing an exit from the ordinary grid. It is precisely there that lies the conceptual whereabouts of the exhibition space, in the limbo between the inside and outside of the systemic framework.

On rainy days, the pipes running through the Garage Gallery pump the water into the city’s underbelly, saturating the walls with a lingering humidity, perpetually reminding the inhabitants about the flow of rainwater. As an embodiment of the mythological river Styx, the artworks present act like a transit between the different layers of the city; the over and underworld, the visible and the invisible. Within this passage space, the sounds of the outside and inside converge, offering a glimpse into a larger, ungraspable network that governs our surroundings. Recreated ceramic and plastic pipes, ventilation shafts, and cables act as cues to the parallel and complex world of human maintenance. This invisible yet ongoing flow of matter, as a bloodstream circuit, anchors us into the present by continuously enabling the extravagance we came to rely on. In "Freed From Desire", the contrasting nature of the closed-circuit water system installation “I always wanted”, compared to the open fountain we find at the entrance - “I wish”, serves as a metaphor for these hidden systems. We hear it, we sense it, yet we do not see it. As with many structures that regulate our social and urban environment, it hides in plain sight.

The presence of cardboard boxes and styrofoam in the exhibition prompts further thoughts of interior vs exterior, form vs essence, fullness vs emptiness. First used as packing means, these materials would envelop diverse objects, taking their shape, imitating sculptural moulds. The artist interprets this process by casting diverse items such as plastic pipe tubes and buckets, creating first negative, then positive copies. Other elements such as the ceramic ventilation grids, small pipes and electric plugs are created by the artist from scratch, as a conscious choice of positioning herself within her own human scale in the architectural context. Yet, they are also copies, though inexact. The overall rendering evokes a sort of a physical manifestation of a digital symphony of zeros and ones. Embracing a non-hierarchical perspective, Ella C Bernard refrains from polarizing attributes into value judging positive or negative realms, opting instead to integrate them within one framework. With the work “I wish” for instance, Bernard constructs a haptic dialogue between the contained and the container, casting its body from the plastic bins that make its water basins, thus creating their fusion, the content.

Intuitively shaping the exhibition backdrop, the artist accentuates humanity's innate proprioceptive understanding of the environment - that is relating to the stimuli connected with the position and movement of the body -, as well as our intricate interdependence with surrounding objects and their constitution. In the show, the dense, hard and sturdy ceramic or concrete materials which are nonetheless prone to shattering oppose the light and soft cardboard or styrofoam - resilient to shocks yet susceptible to damage from water or fire. Transitioning from kinaesthesia to synaesthesia, the artist elucidates her sensory perception of the surrounding environment, traversing and combining the tactile and multisensory experiences. She creates a cocoon, a hideout, a place of human scale and touch, uncontrolled and not controlling.

Like the buds of an underground network, the objects in the show point to an invisible, yet apprehended human aura, moulded around the traces we press into our environment.