Property Guardian

The flyer for Alex Frost’s exhibition at Flat Time House shows, on the front side, the drawings of a comb and a hotel key card.

The objects are portrayed two dimensionally, bereft of colours, and set against a pristine background. While the combination of a key card and comb almost immediately refers to the domestic sphere (the ambit that Frost has chosen to explore during his residency at Flat Time), the quality of the drawings – their cold, technical veneer – has very little do with ideas of the home as a place for sheltering and protection. 

The works that Frost has produced for the show share with the invite a similar rebuff of traditional notions of the home, and combine to create an exhibition setting which looks unwelcoming, if not distressing. These effects result as much from the “domestic” objects chosen by the artist, as from the process of alteration they have undergone.

In the series of tablets hanging on the walls for example, Frost has shrunk pet food packaging and sunken it into resin together with combs, pencils, rulers and dead mosquitos. The goldfishes, turtles and rabbits portrayed on the packaging are transfigured, and look like they are trapped under a thick layer of a petrified, transparent substance. The orderly structure of the compositions – the comb, pencil and ruler all being almost perfectly aligned to the external frame – further lend the works a constraining, asphyxiating look.

None of the works exhibited are given individual titles. Their names coincide with that of the show (Property Guardian 2015), as if the artist  wished to emphasise the whole experience of inhabiting (and guarding) the space, over and above the single items produced for the show at the end of his residency. However, while the titles are left unspecified, the materials and the fabricating techniques that he has employed are itemised with care.

We learn, for example, that Flat Time House’s barbeque has been used for making pewter casts of coins, keys and a potato waffle included in the show. Not only, then, has Frost appropriated all sort of items he found in the space, including – we are told – leftovers from the artists who had lived there before him, but he also uses some of the equipment at the residents' disposal in order to fashion his own work. The choice to turn a cooking appliance into a tool for generating art is full with implications, for it bestows a certain visibility on housework, of which cooking is still an important component. Indeed the replacement of the ephemeral and generic products of cooking with unique works of art, sheds light on housework’s capability to engender value (though indirectly if we follow Marx to the letter), and ultimately prompts its reappraisal.

In the central room of the gallery stand three small sculptures produced by reassembling and plastering together fragments of vernacular pottery. The abstractness of their composition collides with the figurative motifs still recognisable on the surfaces of some of the assembled sections of ceramic. One particular sculpture made of house-shaped teapots particularly struck me. The “houses” are first dismembered and then randomly recomposed, filling every fissure or hole with plaster so as to form a compact and impenetrable structure. This work brings me back to the exhibition title, and to the reflections that underpins Frost’s collaboration with Flat Time house more broadly.

The works on show have indeed ensued from an exploration into the living and housing condition of artists in a current context marked by increasing property speculation. The title of the exhibition, in particular, is a direct reference to property guardianship, a practice to which artists have increasingly turned to in the last decade or so. In Great Britain, those looking for cheap accommodation can rent, for a cost lower than the national average, vacant properties that owners want to secure from damage and squatting. Legally, guardians are not the same as tenants, however, and so they are not entitled to tenants’ rights. They are allowed to remain in the properties for a short and unspecified amount of time, during which, acting almost like human plaster, they have to seal off the edifices from any intrusion that might cause a drop in value.

About to leave the show, I’m told that the exhibition continues outdoors. I thus exit the gallery and follow a narrow path that leads me to a square-shaped sculpture made of sand. The explanatory text I’ve been given by the gallery assistant says it is a “sculpture of a brick barbecue”, but what intrigued me the most is the description of the material components of the work. Beside sand and water, the artist has in fact employed dog & cat repellent spray. I can’t figure out know whether the substance has been sprayed over the sculpture or mixed with the sand, but in both cases the repellent effect of the spray has been transferred onto the object.

The exhibition terminates with a “repellent sculpture” which I’d like to see as a sour parody of guardianship: tenants turned into custodians have to dissuade animalised humans from turning vacant spaces into their shelters.

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