John Hurrell – 11 October, 2012

Visible at night through the FrontBox window from the St. Paul Street footpath, Zhoe Granger’s Asymmetrical Mall Cut in the AUT building blends sixties haircut with compositional imbalance: a small installation with a video loop component. You can see the video here.

Thematically the work seems to be about the post-structuralist projection of commodity desire onto the acquiescent Self. Propped up on a block of charcoal-coloured packaging material is a car door window, a transparent ‘screen’ on which is an image of two clutching but empty female hands. On the right on a plasma screen is a continually revolving turntable on which appear an endless line of phantom products, each one fading into view and out again - to be replaced by another.

These range from boxes of iced coffee and a laptop, to glassy minerals and fashion garments. Some products like white robes or wine glasses are shredded or shattered as they turn, and at the end a young woman is shown wearing a large visor and pointedly holding a handful of cards. These she is looking at closely, as if searching for a solution to commodity addiction.

Granger has made a nicely integrated mini-installation blending moving image with static sculpture, and exploiting darkened glass as a key symbolic element, a screen onto which ‘we’ are projected. The presence in the window of the VCR player, the silver appliance and meandering electrical cords, is crucial - for it adds an instrumentalist component to the reading, a sense of societal inevitability, of greater forces at work.

At times the imagery also has a poetic dimension, such as a high heeled shoe stepping on a chunk of shell-encrusted aggregate, or a buckled woven paper mat swelling like the sea. These seem to be subtle references to the turbulent ocean as a trope of overwhelmingly pervasive social fluidity, and a possible allusion to the large billboards of Ruth Watson (see Landfall #177), with her symbolic weaving of ‘nature’ versus ‘culture’ in constructing the language-speaking Self. A physically simple but intellectually complex window display well worth investigating.

John Hurrell

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