Butler Gallery
10 August – 29 September 2024
‘Deep Time Dip’ by Liane Lang at Butler Gallery in Kilkenny sees the artist present several bodies of previous work, giving the viewer an impression of the impetus behind her practice. Lang’s work is situated between sculpture and photography, using a variety of media to play with viewer subjectivity and contemporary society’s obsession with the image. Lang’s sculptures tell the story of their ‘objectness’, whether industrial or natural, and expand on relations with the body.
The majority of the gallery is occupied by Lang’s recent series, Touch Stone. Numerous found objects are displayed, each carrying an image superimposed on its form. Through these sculptures, Lang plays with representation and narrative to reference origin, identification, expression and a network of (human) associations, conjured by notions of the mimetic.
Liane Lang, Joan in Fragments, 2019, Scagliola, wood and mixed media; photograph by Ros Kavanagh, courtesy of the artist and Butler Gallery.
Lang’s focus on the biography of objects highlights the narratives given to objects by humans, from utility to decoration, functionality to worship. Lang selects imagery loosely connected to each object, creating a story that involves humans in some way – something brought full circle by Lang’s merging of photography and objects. Images are perfectly blended into three-dimensional forms, so we cannot always ascertain where the photograph ends, and the object begins.
Australian anthropologist, Michael Taussig, once described the act of seeing a sunrise as actually touching the sunrise, because the ray of light travels into your eye, stimulating your retinal rods. “Contact and copy merge to become virtually identical, different moments of the one process of sensing; seeing something or hearing something is to be in contact with that something.”1
In Spitewinter Road (2024), a piece of tarmac road is imprinted with the image of a tarmac road. This duality means that the object is simultaneously both a piece of the road and a representation of it. This intelligent subversion reminds me of conceptual artist Joseph Kosuth’s seminal piece, One and Three Chairs (1965), in which a wooden chair is displayed alongside a photograph of the chair, and the dictionary definition of the word ‘chair’.
Liane Lang, Post Hole, 2024, fossil marble; photograph by Ros Kavanagh, courtesy of the artist and Butler Gallery.
A similar kind of phenomenology is summoned by Digging Deep I (2024) – a found shovel that holds an image of a hole on its blade. Is this a hole that the shovel once dug? This idea that an object might display moments of its past leads me to wonder what would happen if I openly wore images of all the holes I have previously dug myself into.
Another hole appears in Shaft (2024), a circular piece of found steel with a borehole descending into blackness. A rope falls over and down into the hole with a hand reaching to grab it from above. This hole references the mine that the metal came from, pulled out by the same hand that later forged it into a circular piece of steel.
Crawlspace Can (2022) is a found aerosol can – flattened, rusty, and aged. Upon its surface are printed two bare feet, sticking out of a cave. In the Road (2024) holds an image that expertly turns a stone into a miniature grotto. Dark shading alludes to a cavity, inside which there are human legs and a hand, resting or hiding. This image projects a tenderness onto the stone, almost taking the form of a religious icon, or monument to shelter.
Liane Lang, ‘Deep Time Dip’, installation view, Butler Gallery; photograph by Ros Kavanagh, courtesy of the artist and Butler Gallery.
Lang also displays photographs from an older body of work, Monumental Misconceptions, set in Memento Sculpture Park in Budapest, Hungary – a site that houses Soviet-era statues, toppled during the country’s transition to democracy. These tangible remnants of Hungary’s communist past include stone dioramas and large bronze figures of dictators, soldiers, and workers. Lang made a series of feminine interjections involving a life-size rubber model and body parts, which are strategically placed to interact with the solid and stern masculine statues. She subverts the celebration of size and strength in these monuments by showing them as brutal and ridiculous.
This witty and poetic questioning of political ideology, as represented by strong, virile men, continues to be relevant today. While ‘Deep Time Dip’ calls to attention the common theme of objectification and the female body, it’s also a provocation on how a female artist can embody and subvert objects directly.
Ella de Búrca is an Irish visual artist and Assistant Lecturer at NCAD.
elladeburca.com
1 Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (New York and London: Routledge, 1993) p21.
