December 31, 2011 |
An elegant black resin creation lying prone on the ground might be a giant tube of mascara, while a biomorphic bit of white upholstery could pass for the kind of sofa you’d expect to find in a chicly minimalist penthouse. Nicole Wermers’ sculptures have the glossy appeal of designer décor. “We live in a world where everything is designed, from egg cups to the sound a computer generates to show it’s been switched on and even our faces,” she reflects. “The result is an inflation of design. Everything has been aesthetically planned, with varying degrees of success, and commodified in the process.”
The London-based artist is an acute observer of spaces dominated by design – a culture that stretches from department stores to our homes. She has a knack for drawing out the stuff that’s meant to melt into the background, as with her beguiling collages that use the surroundings of products in ads cut from fashion magazines. “I am generally interested in public environments, actual and reproduced, particularly those that have been carefully designed to provoke a strong emotional response, like churches and department stores or the pages of magazines,” she says. “This includes architecture designed to communicate status and power, like company lobbies or old-fashioned banks, but also museums and the way they display and structure objects.”
Recently she has made a series of freestanding works in metal, great circles placed in the midst of a room like a magic portal, inspired by the through zones, entrances and exits of shops, where the space between private enterprise and public life is marked by alarmed barriers, cameras and security guards. “I am interested how the design of objects, surfaces and space communicates desire, power and aspirations and how the design of public space in particular structures our movements and activities in everyday life,” she says. With this in mind, the works in her recent London show were linked by thick metal chains, like the kind that warn people off the grass in parks. Wermers points to how our lives are policed and prohibited, not just by the boundaries we can see but by design itself. Design creates the illusion of a miraculously ordered, perfect life; in short, a life that’s controlled by the objects we buy – and that, she implies, is its dark side.
by Skye Sherwin
