essay by Kitty Scott

Media Release. August 31, 1993

Laurel Woodcock: bleuira

Opening SEPTEMBER 7 until 25, 1993

The Or Gallery begins its fall programming with an installation by artist Laurel Woodcock entitled bleuira.

The artist has written: ‘As an installation bleuira points away from that will to chart and name an unknown territory, to reduce meaning to points of exclusion. A direct translation of ‘bleuira’from the French would be; to become blue. The title is derived from a compilation of letters exchanged between Violet Trefusis and Vita Sackville-West. “Quand bleuira sur l’horizon la Desirade.” Here, when translated, bleuira describes that moment when the coastline disappears from the horizon. The exhibition consists of ten, circular steel light boxes illuminating photographic transparencies of the ocean. A compass, embedded in a binnacle stands on the gallery floor. An electronic magnet eases the compass. It slowly moves in a half circle away from north and back again. Sliding the balance again and again from “a truth”, from a specific location to one imagined. Fragmenting the universal and oceanic. Navigating in the peripheries.’ “And what is that terror awaiting them in the shadow? That featureless memory of the terrible fight between slashing breakers and the streaming sails? That peril of water coming from sky and land? And that horror they feel for the might of the sea when she sheds all masks and refuses to be calm, polite, and submississive to the sailors’ direction?”

Luce Irigaray, Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzche

The exhibition bleuira will be accompanied by a brochure with a short critical essay by Kitty Scott.