Rachel Whiteread.
With no found title or information on the piece I am left to guess how it has been made. It appears to be a photomontage made from an image of a section of ‘one of her cast sculptures perhaps ‘House’ superimposed onto a photograph of a different London building. Juxtaposing the images in this way presents us with a comparative study. We see the familiar victorian house beside her reconfiguration of a house by casting the interior space. This presents us with a leap in emotional as well as a visual response, on the right a house as a home, our place, a place of refuge and comfort where windows permit light and a view of the world which we have temporarily left, on the left a bleak grey hard flatness with windows now blind. This ‘leap’ feels as uncomfortable as does this perception test on discovering both interlocked images for these expressions of inside and outside are also giant 3D jigsaw pieces. Does the cast enlighten us as to our home’s interior spirit or does it present the truth of our futile empty existences in stark hard reality? Perhaps her holocaust memorial in Vienna where fineness of finish and mechanical symmetry presents an aesthetic quality too hard to bear in our knowledge of its purpose. The symbolism of a library and the forever closed doors mark starkly the brutality of its dreadful truth.
No matter what one casts (particularly if using a fine material such as plaster) the outcome is always a thing of beauty and wonder, not simply for its inside outness but for its astonishing smoothness or exactness of forms. I’ve as yet to hear R W speak of about this but surely she has hit on a wondrous approach for a lifetime of visual exploration and she has not disappointed in manipulating this technique in powerful innovative and dramatic ways.
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