Dis (Places) an exhibition by Divine Southgate-Smith and Clara Imbert features an entirely new body of work that the two members of ( ) PARENTHESIS STUDIO created within the last year. The exhibition displays some of the duo’s first collaborative investigations concerning their shared interests in the temporal, semiotic and optical properties of space.

Adopting a metaphorical and physical approach based on deconstructing and reassembling the geometries of the gallery space, the duo aims to present to the spectator an environment that permits a sensorial exploration. Highlighting the possible intersections that exist between language (literal form and implicated content) and space (temporal and abstract), they present a juxtaposition of instances where the objects in the space become ethereal vessels constantly shifting in time. As a result, a simultaneous sense of instability and order is implied, encompassed by the acoustical, visual and spatial objects. Hence, what may seem at first glance to be still, is in fact in constant movement, resonating in the frame of the gallery walls.

Symmetry / asymmetry, dissonance / consonance, proximity / distance, fragment the space acting almost as symbols that surface with no defined order. The objects become a sequence, working as perceptible and imagined dimensions, perpetually at the cusp of displacement. Entering the site-specific space, one could observe fleeting gestures such as the surface of a mirror or the distorting perspective of a form. The pace of a durational apparatus and a moving image is balanced then unbalanced, while projected lights create escapes, illusionary landscapes appear. In the progressive change of a horizon, the viewer notices slight changes in the compositions.

While navigating, the space reveals sculptural reliefs made of materials such as metal, glass and wood alongside drawings, prints and texts. Screens and projections prompt a conversation between other indicative elements of time such as water, sand and stones. The elements will be used in common or separately working as the relics of the temporal formation of a space. At the limit of virtual and material representation of the pieces are studied, cross- examined till the point where colours become lights and lines become form, shaping a method to their understanding and in a symbiosis creating their own spatial language.

“In the end not only is space seen as linguistic but language is seen as spatial” ‘Thinking Space’
Mike Crang and Nigel Thrift