Ian Monroe in his studio near Tower Bridge, London
Ian Monroe's second solo show at Haunch of Venison opens on 3 March with a new series of two-dimensional works and sculptures. The works continue Monroe's investigation of the structures and infrastructures that manipulate and facilitate our interface with the built environment. Images of cavernous interior spaces devoid of people depict post-human wastelands and futuristic architectures, both inviting and disorienting. Monroe has said of his work, 'Like the invisible yet immense forces in a sub-basement column of a skyscraper, there is a liminal inertia that surrounds us. Physics tells us that in any system, for every amount of order there has to be an equal disordering and thus the future is inevitably tinged with melancholy, no matter how crisp and fluorescent.'
Your Gallery magazine paid a visit to Ian Monroe's studio as he was putting the finishing touches to the works for his forthcoming exhibition. Photography by Dafydd Jones.
YOUR GALLERY: First of all, can you explain why you've chosen the title 'PLANIT' for the exhibition coming up at Haunch of Venison?
IAN MONROE: PLANIT is the title of a lost and undocumented Kazimir Malevich plaster sculpture which was part of the Architeckton series. It only exists as a reference in the Zagorsk Archive as 'Planit, plaster 5464 KrTG' and as such has a certain fascination for me. By using the title 'Planit', Malevich seems to be suggesting the all-encompassing, almost omniscient possibility of his project, yet this is the piece that is lost, and remains only as a potential. In terms of my work, the Architeckton series were made of unpainted plaster and so were colorless, and thus appear as prototypes or plans, like the strictly gray-scale work in my show. By removing the color the work has moved closer to a diagramatic representation of space, one which exists as an approximation.
YG: In the past your work has focused on interior spaces. With this new body of work you seem to have gone beyond the interior to think about space in a wider urban context - as the title of the show also suggests.
IM: Yes, but the wider context has extended itself to infinity. By this I refer to our ever decreasing sense of human scale in the face of an apparently expanding and numbingly massive universe. Certainly there is a hyper-urban, or more particularly municipal, feel to the spaces that I am referencing, and it is the desolate anonymity of many urban environments that I identify with. Incidentally, there is a website called F.O.V.I.C.K.S., which stands for Friends of Vast Industrial Concrete Kafkaesque Structures (personally I feel the Kafkaesque bit is an overstatement). It is a kind of train-spotter organization that seeks out massive engineered landscapes like the completely concrete LA River. These types of structures have a simultaneous attraction and repulsion because they reveal the hubris of human engineering and yet are attractive because we can identify and admire the 'design' choices that were made by another human.
YG: You have mentioned the significance of Malevich to this particular exhibition. I'm wondering if there are other artists or architects whose work has been particularly relevant to you while you've been making these new works.
IM: Many of the Suprematists and their sometime rivals the Constructivists are important as a historically relevant moment, as well as architecture in general. Plus a very healthy dose of theoretical physics as it approaches ever more philosophical limits of its own knowledge. Information and systems theory also fascinate me, in particular the ability of both people and ants, for example, to collectively organize structures far bigger than any individual could envisage, yet they emerge without any conscious group direction.
YG: Your work sits somewhere between sculpture and painting - you use various materials, such as linoleum, paper, pieces of carpet, to build up the spaces you create, much as you would with layers of different coloured paint. Is this straddling of the two mediums a deliberate ploy on your part?
IM: My work is often posited as specifically neither, yet strangely both, which is important because it reveals the complicity between the image and the viewer that a system of representation such as perspective demands. Cerebrally the viewer is caught between the rational knowledge that these images are totally flat, and yet the simple singularity of a vanishing point allows a kind of short circuit to occur and the brain invents an interpretation of depth. It is this kind of non-existent-yet-mutually-agreed-upon space that fascinates me, a space that we are inherently mistrustful of, yet we are drawn in because somehow it seems to fit a collective idea of a place we have all been to.
YG: The spaces you create also feel as if they have come from a mind that thinks very clearly in 3D, as an architect would.
IM: I have always approached my work in a spatial way rather than as images or compositions, as genetically sculptural, and in this sense the use of the material reinforces this quality. I often think of the forms in the paintings as if I were building them with screws and glue, but I have the luxury of ignoring physics, and thus I can realize impossible structures.
YG: As well as luring us in, there continues to be a sense of absence in the spaces you create, an eery hollowness which derives most obviously from the lack of people. So that you get these spaces with enough recognisable signs or hints to suggest they are perhaps intended for people and yet they are entirely void of human beings. Do you intend these as idealised, utopian spaces or, rather, imaginary Borghesian inventions?
IM: I would first of all say that my spaces are not utopian, in that they are not for people, but they are 'no-where' in the literal sense of the word. They are post-human, and entirely without the generosity of the soft surface, but yet, like you have said, they are somehow inviting. It seems a particular drive of human societies to build, to make manifest their beliefs in vast energy-consuming structures that outlive the cultures that created them (I am thinking of many ancient peoples such as the Egyptians or Mayans). We as a species have a deep need to leave a mark or a legacy, and often the survival of this mark, the perfection of this mark, takes precedent over and subsumes the individual. I don't feel that this a negative quality, but that it exists drives some of my thinking.
YG: It's been a couple of years since your last show in London so it's terrific to see how your work has evolved since then, the new directions it's going in, one of which is the use of text.
IM: Yes, I've been embedding text, sometimes legible, sometimes cryptic, as well as continuing to show sculpture alongside the wall-based work. In some work the legibility of the illusory space has given way to a more abstract or graphic imagery, as if they were details of a larger whole, and I think the starkness of this show communicates a certain relentless exploration of a machinic phylum.
Ian Monroe
3 March - April
Haunch of Venison
6 Haunch of Venison Yard
London W1K 5ES
T: +44(0)207 495 5050
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