Installations 2001
A New Exhibition by Rebecca Feiner

Where Rebecca Feiner's last exhibition was monochrome and documentary in approach, FEEL is polychromatic and intimate.
feel
Through a series of site specific installations occupying the dark, underground vaults of a former bank in Shoreditch, she continues to explore themes of childhood,inviting us to look beyond the surface of the everyday, abandoned objects and spaces to reveal secret narratives.



Feiner's references are not to static art but to cinema: film noir and the strange, surrealist animation of Jan Svankmajer. Hers is an ironic and blackly humourous vision that discovers contrast and duality: curioisity in apprehension, fearfulness in comfort, perfection in imperfection, advantage in disadvantage, people as objects and objects as people.

EVERYDAY ABANDONED 1

At the bottom of a lift shaft that once carried armoured vans full of money, Feiner has created a grim fairytale of imprisonment, a dark, metaphorical vision of childhood. Cages carry frightening connotations, yet they surround inner-city playgrounds.

The tactile softness of wool is a sterotypical symbol of warmth and security but here the baby blue and pink strands hanging from the cold, unforgiving metal, evoke a cruelly hillarious, Pythonesque caricature of mad, knitting mothers prettifying nightmarish subterranean nurseries.

Yet even in this hellish playspace there are sounds of imagination and fantasy. Nobody can control your thoughts, and the shadowy "dreaming" graffito on the wall is a confirmation of existence, an escape, a home run through the wire and into the future.

     

EVERYDAY ABANDONED 2

An old wardrobe, everyone's childhood hiding place, represents familiar stories of things revealed and concealed behind a door, the entry, or exit, to another world.

No-one is too big to step inside and curl up small again. It may be a source of fantasy, a refuge, a womb, a trap, a suffocating embrace or an escape, but this personal cinema takes you beyond a melancholy physical landscape, reflecting light and hope from darknes and hard reality.



EVERYDAY ABANDONED 3

On a vehicle turntable once used by the security vans that decended into the bank vaults from ground level, the delights of seaside holidays are remembered in builders sand and rusty ironwork, found on the streets above.

This urban shore is a nether-world antithesis to Land Art: shredded office paper is the city's seaweed, every abandoned strand carrying the imprint of workers' dreams, memos, letters, calculations of possession and redundancy.

Life is everywhere yet unseen in a walked-over crowd of multi coloured stones, each one battered and scarred by elemental tides, each one perfectly imperfect.