The works in Double, Time. Climb. began their life as dot points in Word Document list on Charles Dennington’s computer screen. And now you see them, in glorious maturation, on the previous page in a subclass of Printed Word Document list known as a room sheet.
In between these two points: the thing itself. Or more accurately, the thing that stands for the thing itself. This is the integral element in Dennington’s individual works, and appropriately enough to this whole exhibition, and perhaps appropriately enough to his broader artistic practice, and maybe perhaps appropriately enough to his selfhood, and potentially maybe perhaps even appropriately enough to something bigger again.
The list is an apt synecdoche for an exhibition of works dealing with the notion of synecdoche itself. The items within a list can be interpreted as the smaller aspects or exemplifications of the unifying feature that justifies the list in the first place.
As you already have a list of titles with a sufficiently observable implied whole of its own (the room sheet), and as Charlie’s embryonic Word Document of potential artworks is, I predict, incomplete and also, like, kind of none of our business as viewers within a gallery context, given that former list of potential works bears a relationship to the room sheet that an Ultrasound scan bears to a Christening, here is my untitled list of conversational snippets between Charlie and myself from which you are free to infer whatever synecdochal whole you like:
Lunch / art
Interior/ exterior
Directing the subject
Framing
Satisfying
The naivety of omnipresent photography versus the innocence of historical portrait photography
Formality and sweetness
Situation for a dream
Bill Brandt, Erna Lendvai-Dircksen
A mural that depicts chiaroscuro lighting on the wrinkles of elephant skin that connotes the whole of mammal kind
Stimuli
The longer the list, the less mysterious the relationship between the depicted part and the unspoken whole,
so I think I’ll leave it at that.
Giselle Stanborough
August 2013