Matt’s Gallery Unit 2, 65 Decima Street London SE1 4QR T (020) 7635 2823 E [email protected]
Leah Capaldi, Lay Down, 2016, film still. Image courtesy of Matt’s Gallery and the artist.
Leah Capaldi Lay Down
Private View – Sunday 06 November, 3-6pm 11 November – 18 December 2016, Friday –Sunday 12-6pm
Lay Down is the first major solo show by artist Leah Capaldi. The exhibition opens Matt’s Gallery’s temporary new space in Bermondsey, marking a new era for the gallery as it moves south of the river.
Lay Down is an entirely new work by Capaldi, a site-specific installation involving a video sculpture with continual performance, inspired by her time in the deserts of the American West. Here, Capaldi met a Utah cowboy and his horse, a film exploring their relationship and the vast, performative landscape that surrounds them forms the core of the installation. Lay Down asks how power is constructed and understood, this question arising throughout the installation, in the iconic figure of the American cowboy, the influence of the sublime landscape and the authority of the screen.
The crossover area between the disciplines of sculpture and performance are of particular interest to Leah Capaldi’s practice, with echoes of the seminal performance work of the late 1960s and early 70s. Capaldi’s work explores the pivotal relationship between object or subject, encouraging the audience to question themselves in relation to the work and playing with notions of surveillance and spectatorship.
Video, 5.1 surround sound, projectors, steel frame, silicone screen, timber, cortex, plasterboard, light bulbs, roll matt, foam, timer and male performer. Dimensions variable. Video Duration 21 mins
Lay Down is generously sponsored by:
With thanks to: West Taylor, Bill Roberts, Elliot Ross, Jason Moffat, Roddy Canas, Paul Russell, Barbara Capaldi, Arthur Manzo, Al Gunby, Elias Bate, Angus Braithwaite, Lawrence Leaman, Tim Lucas from Price and Myers. Performer Credits: Jonathan Caruana, Josh Gardener, Gordon Raeburn, Bless Klepcharek
Matt’s Gallery is an Arts Council England National Portfolio Organisation and founding member of Common Practice. www.mattsgallery.org
Notes to Editors Text by Leah Capaldi
EXHIBITION BACKGROUND
Research trip In 2014 I was awarded The Arts Foundation Yoma Sasburg Sculpture Fellowship which gave me the chance to travel to America for 3 months. I wanted to investigate how landscape influences the actions of the people within it so I journeyed out to the West to understand frontiers. I wanted to research how people adapt to living on the edge of civilisations, do you survive or perish? How do you transform in that environment and does the hostile land shape the people within it?
Land Art I spent 3 weeks out in the deserts of Nevada, Arizona and Utah sleeping with seminal pieces of Land Art and understanding space. I have studied sculpture, I teach sculpture and I make sculpture but I have never experienced the vast open spaces in the deserts of the West. Spending three weeks camping in this environment meant that I became part of it which helped me to know space in a new way, I embodied it, I felt my edges. In these colossal spaces you are immediately within the landscape which makes you very aware of your movements upon it. The desert feels so empty, you are forced to examine yourself. Time slows and becomes physical as you see cars kick up dust on the horizon.
We don’t have access to these kind of open spaces in the UK because of our history with class systems and land ownership. In America the landscape has informed a national idea of freedom, which has directly shaped American laws and the constitution.
By camping with the Land Art I understood the work in an intimate way. I attempted to make art whilst at Double Negative, Spiral Jetty and Sun Tunnels but my interventions felt insignificant. I buried blocks of ice and laid face down in the salt lake until my body began to crystallize but the most resonant material was the enormous landscape surrounding me. I became aware of the use of my body, my own borders and edges. Small movements became louder than grand gestures as it was useless to compete with the scale that surrounded me. The space is the buffer and the frame.
West Taylor and Mustangs I saw a Ray Mears mini series called How The West Was Won on BBC2. It featured a cowboy/horse whisperer called West Taylor who worked with Mustangs in Utah. Mustangs are wild horses that were born in the landscape. Their image has become synonymous with the tenacity and survival in the romantic Old West. West Taylor says that mustangs don’t need to be taught how to be a horse, they just are. If you put a pedigree racehorse in the desert it would break its leg because it doesn’t understand how to move through the terrain but Mustangs know the landscape because they are born into it and this specialist knowledge influences how they operate within it. West told me that he had got stuck in quicksand and it was only through watching his horse roll onto her side and spiral her way out of the pit that he learnt how to get out. West would have died if he had not listened to what his horse was showing him. I took 3 months of intensive western style riding lessons in the UK and flew out to Utah to meet him.
I am interested in how people move through spaces. The Vincennes Trace was an old Buffalo migration trail that was adopted by European settlers and has now become Route 150 through Indiana and Kentucky. West and I planned to travel on horseback following The Old Spanish Trail through Utah, Nevada and into California to document imprints on the land left by a large migration through it. This study feels even more poignant today in the midst’s of the refugee crisis.
West was the great grandson of the only sheriff in Wayne County to go into the Badlands in Colorado (impassable notorious natural fort and safe place for hiding outlaws in 1860’s) to catch his outlaw and leave with both members of his party alive. He later took the outlaw home and locked him in the grain shed to wait for the weekly jail carriage to come and pick him up. West seemed to be directly related to the fantasy of the Wild West, he was also involved in the exhumation of the real Sundance Kid who had secretly lived next to his great grandfather disguised as a farmer when he parted ways with Butch Cassidy.
West wasn’t the typical iconic Marlborough man cowboy. West spoke to his horse Cassidy in a gentle way, they developed their own form of communication based on body language which they both understood. We recreated a lot of iconic shots from well-known cinematic westerns, often in the sunset, it was breathtaking. I felt like we were in Once Upon A Time In The West. I started to learn to communicate with my horse Sherriff and soon discovered that you can’t trick a horse because the horse can see straight through you. www.mattsgallery.org
Western Films The outlaw figure is a semi-nomadic wanderer, the hero who is bound to no-one and is steely and cool. The outlaw lives on the edges riding from town to town putting things right like a medieval knight errant. The outlaw is able to look at the town objectively, Clint Eastwood in Pale Rider - a mythical preacher who arrives and leaves again in a gust of arid dust. The artist is a bit like an outlaw, dwelling on the edges. I want to be an outlaw, I don’t want to kill someone but I want the freedom and clarity of living on the boundaries of this structure and questioning it.
I have watched American and Spaghetti Westerns for years. There is often a clear sense of moral right and wrong in westerns. This is perhaps more obvious in The Outlaw Josey Wales or Shane or The Searchers with Clint Eastwood, Alan Ladd or John Wayne, the archetypal male hero. In classic westerns the cowboy is usually a white man (according to Hollywood) and he has a ridged set of male roles to perform. Spaghetti westerns are theatrical like opera and American westerns are much more moral, religious and conservative. My favourite western is McCabe and Mrs Miller because the heroine claims power in it, women don’t really have power in westerns.
The American icon, the mans man is synonymous with the western genre and the landscape which inspired it. George Bush began speaking about frontier spirit and core American values toppling totalitarian regimes for justice and freedom to justify the war in Iraq. During this period there was an increase in the production of Westerns. In times of crisis Americans returned to solid gender roles and shoot ‘em ups about good and evil. Westerns simplify this, the baddie in the black hat and the goodie in the white. The more uncertain a population is of their period in history the more they go and see westerns.
What is a Lay Down? To lay your horse down on the ground is process used in natural horsemanship to establish or re-establish trust between horse and rider. It is a very emotional process for both participants, a Lay Down is not a trick. A horse would rarely lie down in the wild because lying down would demonstrate that it was hurt or unwell and it would become vulnerable to predators. For West to lay down Cassidy he has to surrender his ego and she must surrender her instinct. A Lay Down helps the horse to become safer, less anxious and more focused. It also helps to cement a bond between horse and rider so they can trust each other. In the film you can hear West asking Cassidy if she is ready to lay down, Cassidy responds and they begin communicating in body language. Once you start a Lay Down you have to see it through.
Lay Down – The Exhibition Sculpture, performance and video come together through the installation.
Performance Only male performers participate as the viewer is already introduced to the female body on the screen through the horse, to ask a female participants to assume passive positions live in the space would become loaded. By working with male performers it opens up the work which also becomes about masculinity. I am a female artist and this is work made in 2016, gender is an important material in this work. The title of the work is about power and action.
The performers are static for 1 hour in each pose, they are in the space for 6 hours a day, endurance is a big part of this work. My practice questions the line between subject and object and I ask if you are performing being an object at what point do you become one? Long durations spent in static positions make this transformation more visible. Performers become an object alive but lifeless. I ask the viewer to imagine being an object and inhabit the body of the performer as well as their own. Does the viewer become implicated in the work? Are they a spectator or a participant? I work with the performers as materials within the work and their experience as sculpture is documented in questionnaires after each session.
Metal and Rubber I was thinking about film narrative during the installation by entering via a long thin tapering corridor lined with the correx sheets which were used to protect the floor when the gallery was built. The corridor restricts the viewer but opens into the main space with a rubber screen hanging off of a skeletal metal structure. The screen references the body, the rubber is like skin quivering and breathing as live bodies move. The screen is responding directly to being viewed as performers twitch or the viewer walks past. The metal is the armature, the bones of the sculpture.
Film The 21min film can be difficult to watch. West and Cassidy both struggle with the lay down, it’s only when they both surrender that they combine and relax. This is a love story, two independent figures come together and separate again. The horse becomes the female body within the space. When she is hobbled, it makes me feel restrained and claustrophobic but then as they lay down and West is stroking her hair I relax and breathe like the horse.
Leah Capaldi, Oct 2016 www.mattsgallery.org