I Stop Noticing Some Limits and Start Noticing Others [installation view], 2022

Tender Light Holds Something Raw

by Jillian Knipe


To see the collaborative work of Jill Tate and Matt Denham is to bear witness. Whether that is to the preparation or aftermath of an event is not able to be known. In fact, seeing without knowing is both the cornerstone and the protective seal of their work. The way you might find yourself in an unbearable situation and zone out, calculating the number of pictures on the wall or tracing the curve of the armchair. Or how you might wrap something fragile, readying it for deep repository. In this sense, Degrees of Freedom, 2022 delivers equal servings of familiar and uncanny, where we are never quite certain of what can be relied upon.

I Stop Noticing Some Limits and Start Noticing Others [still], 2022

Over Story. Under Story. Storage Giant. Standing Silent.
I Stop Noticing Some Limits and Start Noticing Others, 2022 is a film which prepares the viewer with a double meaning: Who are the "others"? Are they other limits or other people? Sliding through animated stills, I Stop Noticing - a poignant shortening - is a left and right split screen, exhibiting a first attempt at logical order. The mood speaks to old black and white analogue as much as to the skills of making a Wes Anderson animation. To the left of the screen, light streams into a warm grey room, landing as a sharply outlined geometric shape on one wall which is then, it seems, echoed with blurred edges on the adjacent wall. The camera descends vertically to reveal a coffee table with a mug. Two tapping sounds and a scratch, snap on the scene to the right, revealing another monochrome, though this time cloaked in a cinnamon hue. I wonder where the light is coming from and how it can be flipped at a right angle. With such sparse furnishing, I wonder what part of the house this is. Or if it's even a house. Is the coffee cup is for someone who is coming or someone who has gone already. And is it a psychological space or a physical one? In other words, this one, simple opening scene, presents a myriad of befuddlements that continue throughout the work and across the installation, accelerating our neural networks so that we are prompted to look with greater intensity.

Two Degrees of Freedom [installation view], 2022

Plain Frame. Frame Name. Name Nameless. Blame Blameless.
Going some way to explain the work, Two Degrees of Freedom, 2022 clues us in with two neighbouring windows to the artists' constructed world. Through mimicry, it's a neat segue into our world also being a construction. We see the meticulous detail the artists have applied when producing each item; where lasered MDF is covered in cardboard and concrete skim, directing us towards a stream of production conversations about what goes where and how; about invention and trials; about how objects are perceived differently across real space, camera lens and screen. Here, one room is grey, the other brown: specific non-colours that would otherwise discreetly serve to boost more vivid, accompanying pigments. The grey is textured like a contradiction of warm concrete. Like a painted wash; a metaphorical whitewash, but in grey. In harmony, next door's terracotta is reminiscent of autumnal glow over the dying detritus of summer. Featured are featureless books in characterless shelving, imageless images housed in plain surrounds such as blank box, basic table and ladder. These are the skeletal props of domestic existence, yet there are no people depicted in the works. In fact, their absence is the most constant presence which magnifies each element of the room as to its existence, form and purpose. Take the ladder for instance with its A-framed diagonals and strikethrough horizontal lines. It might enable elevation. Might describe the linear basics of minimalism. Might represent an ascension to salvation; a pathway to the mind. The way it props up a leaning picture frame with its passive functionality suggests it might also prop us up. And here is the path to another set of maybes: of a single mug being towards a restful cup of tea, two mugs being towards sharing a coffee and a chat, a chair for relaxing. So perhaps it is us as viewers who are half of the present humans as we draw in the work to create our own domestic stories. The other half is then the collaborative artists themselves.

Alternating scenes of order and disarray unfold in Forms of Quiet

Mind Find. Find Mind. Stay Sleeping. Safe Keeping.
All these furniture innocents may equally be guilty. Terrifying even, in the way they present a dumb contrast to domestic drama. Idiotic lounge room. Complacent kitchen. And so on. We might also think of domestic objects as holders of memory. Of emotionless witnesses to our grief, giving us strength by their sturdy presence. We have perhaps underestimated how much we rely on them to be upright and functional. Consider the contrasting scenes of disarray in Forms of Quiet, 2022. We can almost hear the worrying sound of books as they spill from their shelves and the landing thud of the upturned chair, as the scene triggers a violent memory. Else maybe it triggers the opposite: a passive contemplation of how lines contribute to composition and how diagonals can be held within horizontal and vertical borders.

Degrees of Freedom [installation view], 2022

Dusty Dreaming. Dreamy Evening. Hidden Harsh. Shadows Cast.
Light, its glow and lack, is the ever-present character across the installation. It illuminates domestic settings which appear to be covered in a blanket of dust, creating quiet and stifling breathing. When shining outwards, the rays bellow loud and fierce. When glowing inwards, it is only just lighter than darkness, only just warmer than cool, nodding to the strangeness of film noir, creating intrigue and due concern. When light appears sparsely, it highlights how much of these scenes fall into shadow. What is lingering in this darkness? The light itself gives quiet hope or moments of peaceful reflection recalling Rembrandt's St Peter in Prison, 1631 or Jeremiah Lamenting the Destruction of Jerusalem, 1630. These comparisons are not so much to flex art history, as they are to relay the long running, ingrained sense of light gauging mood as it moves from the birth to the death of the day. We are, after all, animals whose lives are shaped around a bodily reaction to variations in illumination so it is no wonder we have sought to manipulate it.

Digital Glitch. Glitch Pitch. Pitch Poise. White Noise.
Forms of quiet fade in and out, dart across the film. Created from room sounds where nothing in particular is happening - a hand brushing across carpet or a door shutting - their effect is scratchy and full of expectation rather than clarification. It is easy to imagine incidental sounds we wouldn't normally tune into unless the room is completely quietened - cooling fans in digital devices or lifting the needle arm off the turntable - creating an effect of tuning in, turning out, false ons and fake offs. These are normal enough sounds to seem familiar, yet their editing skews our sense of balance as it plays left mono, right mono and, with all those hazy surfaces, there's not much hope of the natural reverb to elucidate our sound perception.

Hand me Down and Hardly Working [installation view], 2022

Chair Seen. Scene Maker. Marker Line. Shaping Time.
Amongst the contributing mediums are the formalities of paintings. These act as report cards on light and dark. A chair seems to stare at a doorway as it recognises another form of chair. The essence of chairness is agreed. A desk composed of rectangles houses and holds similar shapes, overseen by a rectangular picture frame. Here is a collaboration of rhomboids, huddled into a canvas composition so that we might consider their connections and potentials. Though what is particularly striking is how one image might conjure a philosophical bent, while the other points towards the physicality of flat planes. Any sureness we may have gathered in the certainty of physical objects in the installation, dissolves at the sight of them depicted in paint.

Reframing [detail], 2022

Near Works. Works Far. Far Magic. Fore Logic.
Degrees of Freedom is a term which plays out its own meaning in a range of fields. In statistics it is concerned with the number of independent pieces of information which are used to calculate the estimate. In physics and chemistry, it refers to dimensions of a physical parameter, within which elements have independent movement. In the social sciences, it's used as a metaphor for thinking about determinism and free will. And here we have it as the title of an art exhibition, determining how terminology might be stretched into different realms while still maintaining its core meaning. It also becomes a tipping point for how art works might be analysed. How far can we move from thinking about an art installation as art, before it becomes more of an activation point? If we consider the term "degrees" for instance, we can think of temperature and physical proximity, where closer registers heat which cools with distance, and emotional judgement is at one end, while logical judgement sits at the other. It could also be thought of as time. Our immediate idea and sensory responses plus the ones we carry known and unknown in our minds. And here we land on the idea of life imitating art where the "use" of the work is to broaden our scope of thinking about our place in the world.

Reframing [installation views], 2022

Non Sense. Sense Move. Moving Dreams. Making Scenes.
There's a moment in Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker's Mystery Sonatas / for Rosa where the dancers are reassembling, during which the back corner of the stage is exposed rather than the standard soft edged darkness which normally encircles the spotlight. It reveals a plain-sighted practicality, a stark contrast to the writhing, pulsating and jolting body movements from the previous solo scenes. It accentuates how much we are able to suspend belief while knowing the presentation is only ever a snapshot of a much larger truth. The much larger truth in Degrees of Freedom is something we will never know. If it is trauma, then the installation portrays how trauma often lacks dramatic loudness; how the quiet monotony of going about business as usual in its wake is far more typical, though no less painful and difficult. This is work with construction at its heart where the meticulous staging and openness points towards an agreed trust of the viewers. Therefore "heart" becomes heartfelt. Where Jill Tate brings a history of architectural and domestic photography and Matt Denham contributes a study of memory loss, it is not surprising to find an expertise that is as astute as it is sensitive, presenting us with stage sets which we know to be false but we also completely believe them, even love them for acknowledging the vulnerable rawness within us and handling it with complete tenderness.