It was a hot day. If I may be permitted to use the vernacular, it was poes warm. I walked, my body feeling like it was wrapped in a rug, and my mouth got the privilege of sucking on a corner of it till I could scratch the word 'dry' on my tongue. It follows then that walking into Bell-Roberts was an amazing experience. The air-con softly purred. The unsweaty desk attendant gave me a gentle smiling nod. The tiles gleamed cleanly. This, my friends, was transcendence. Going beyond one state and emerging into another and fuck Kant and Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (who, by the way, was cremated on an enormous pyre of sandalwood yesterday).

Talking of burning, Lyndi Sales show at the Bell-Roberts, TRANSIenT, contained lots of laser-cut materials. And she has pushed her cut aesthetic really far in this show, the imagery is more concise, and the materials smarter. I was stunned by Shatter, a huge simulation of a point of impact on glass cut out of air tickets. A bullet hole, or the first crack that ends up with you sucked into the void at 35 000ft. It was a simple metaphor, and very terrifying. It was when the metaphors started getting a little more wishywashy that I started to long for the heat outside. It's too easy to talk about death as a transient period, that's the crap that sells spiritual books by the planeful, made the above mentioned yogi a multi-billionaire and has kept Christians twisting our balls for years. Moving from quite a scary work to this wall text: "Lyndi Sales investigates the subject of transcendence from a personal perspective. The aeroplane journey acts as a metaphor for departures and arrivals. Flying becomes symbolic of transition, transcendence and a state of unpredictability. The tunnel of light scenario and the vortex are explored as a portal between the known and the unknown." I'm not convinced that this metaphor explores anything interesting in the process of dieing, it's not the messy corporeal dead body, nor is it personal grieving (although there is, I understand, an element of this in it, it doesn't read that way) both which could be interesting. Instead it's quasi spirituality, poetry of the type that glosses over our true fear of death.

(As a brief aside: When I saw this show advertised I read it first as TRANSLenT, which was odd because it opened on Lent, an odd Christian Ramadan thing. This illustrates the danger of using those weird pomo(ther) parent(theses) punning. My pen is heavy as I write this)

Labels: Bell-Roberts, lyndi sales