Billie Clarken's first solo show Change Blindness opens March 20th at @aplus.berlin
“Trap doors” is an ongoing series by Billie Clarken. The six panels displayed in the exhibition space are refrigerator doors. Found as leftovers on the streets, dismantled, collected, and hung at their purposive height – between eye level and hand grip – the refrigerator doors in a white cube highlight a meaning and perception shift, in which detritus becomes a precious treasure-trove.
(image kindly stolen from Billie, during set up)
The refrigerator, as an everyday object, intrigues the artist. Object poems, which contemplate ordinary items, come into mind.
Clarken considers this big memo board to be an interesting space to explore, physically and objectively, to fill in, to overlap different non-linear timelines, reality with fiction, shopping and other to-do lists with postcards, poems, quotations, calendar dates, photos, children’s drawings, grave frottages. Literally, everything a small lodestone can hold.
Yet, a closer look reveals that the doors of refrigerators are printed with photographs of refrigerators' doors, upon which other real elements such as drawings, postcards or photos are overlapped and fixed. This unexpected manner of lifting and moving things confuses the viewer’s mental perception.
As the title of the exhibition is slowly disclosed, we understand that we failed noticing the differences between what is printed and what is real from the beginning. No flash of light coming from opening the refrigerator is needed to introduce us to the changes of the appearance... (excerpted from text by Majla Zeneli, Åplus Berlin)