Reading Room
8 – 29 October 2011
Opening Saturday October 8 at 14:00
Exhibition brochure: please scroll down to Downloads or collect hard copy at the gallery

Jonah Sack draws attention to the art gallery as space in his first solo exhibition at GALLERY AOP. His, however, is not the perfunctory critique of ‘the white cube’ type of exhibition space. Instead, Sack presents different kinds of spaces within the physical gallery space. His new drawings, prints and artist’s books invoke a sense of far off spaces as well as very near, close-up spaces. By displaying these works in novel ways, he creates yet more different experiences of space as such. At times Sack’s spaces are ambiguous: near and far seem unbridgeable in some of the works, but in others near and far are offered simultaneously, creating an axonometric space.

Sack uses old postcards on which he draws to suggest far off places. Postcards bring the receiver fleetingly in close contact with the sender. Postcards are also aid memoirs of far off places one might have visited. “The space in the postcard is meant to evoke detachment or to suggest a kind of remote longing,” he says. The fleetingness of the experience of these spaces is enhanced by what appears like shafts of light or gusts of rain that Sack draws over the postcards. He likens these to “the scoring ink lines on certain etchings”. Sack first saw similar line ‘shafts’ as a young boy in the Johannesburg Art Gallery when he was confronted with the famous Rembrandt etching of the Crucifixion, The Three Crosses. He has subsequently used such shaft-like lines in many of his landscape drawings.

A sense of nearness, on the other hand, is created in the many small artist’s books on display in the gallery on display tables, evoking the idea of a ‘reading room’. Paging through these books and handling them is a very intimate experience, mirroring their intimate subject matter. “Distance shrinks to the gap between them (two figures), and the envelope of space in which they move,” Sack says.

In Sack’s drawings of cityscapes, the world is both near and far. “Many of the images are drawn in parallel projection, a system of translating three dimensional space into a two dimensional image without using the techniques of perspective. Without a vanishing point, lines which are parallel in reality are also parallel on the picture plane. Objects depicted in this way have the property of being close and far simultaneously. Parallel projection makes the distant intimate. But it’s a strange kind of intimacy. We can’t get any closer to the objects depicted in parallel projection – it’s as if they are under glass. Parallel projections are also strongly associated with idealized or abstracted images of the real world: the exploded view of the workings of a machine, or the plans of buildings yet to be built. This third kind of space is constructed space. It’s the space that our objects want to occupy, and that we imagine ourselves occupying when we build them.”

Sack uses additional drawing techniques like grids, frames, diagrams and maps to create his third kind of space. In addition, he tilts the picture plane: what is normally displayed vertically on the walls of the gallery, are now displayed horizontally on flat surfaces. Sack elucidates this shift by saying, “Walter Benjamin writes, ‘One may assume two sections that cut through the world’s substance; firstly, the longitudinal cut done in painting, and secondly, the cross-section as found in certain graphics. The slicing seems to effect representation, to somehow contain the things, while the cross-section’s quality is rather symbolic: it contains signs.’

“This horizontal cross-section is the domain of maps, diagrams, and certain kinds of drawings. It emphasizes abstract relationships over surfaces, and symbols rather than pictures. This is obvious in the case of maps, which work via symbols, as well as a horizontal isomorphism with the land. But there’s also a sense in which the act of drawing – quick, simplified, linear, symbolic – is more like the act of mapping than the act of painting. Drawings are often made horizontally, on a table, and Benjamin suggests that certain kinds of drawings should be displayed that way.

“Like a comic, a drawing placed horizontally is read rather than viewed, and decoded rather than scanned. It has a different relationship to the body of the viewer – it occupies the body’s own space. The viewer crowds over the image; he is aware of his own body in relation to the page. This is even more so if the image can be handled, turned over or unfolded, like a book or map or newspaper.”
The anonymous gallery space makes way for a reading room in Sack’s exhibition at GALLERY AOP.

Biography
Jonah Sack completed a Masters in Fine Art at the Glasgow School of Art, Scotland between 2004 and 2006. Before that he went on a research study residence in the Manga Department, Kyoto Seika University, Japan, from September 2005 to January 2006. Sack also holds a BA (Honours) in Philosophy from the University of the Witwatersrand, which he obtained in 2003, and a BA (Fine Art) in Fine Art & Art Criticism, also from University of the Witwatersrand, which he obtained in 2002. He was Fellow of the Gordon Institute for Performing and Creative Arts at the University of Cape Town in 2009 and Fellow of the Skye Foundation, Cape Town, in 2004. His first solo exhibition at GALLERY AOP is mounted in October 2011. Before that he was included in the seminal drawing group show, Draw Links at GALLERY AOP in October 2010. Apart from these, Sack has had many other local and international exhibitions. He lives and works in Cape Town.

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