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Hannah Sawtell
The fragmented images which display themselves on Hannah Sawtell’s shelf-like structures seem so confident of their place and the clarity of their collective message that we can only assume they are part and parcel of a slick advertising campaign for a product that our pathetic brains are as yet incapable of grasping.
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With their smoothly lacquered steel frames, their toughened glass, their decals and their rubber fittings, the displays remind me of the upscale signage we increasingly find in our banks and pharmacies: burnished crowd-proof metal armatures guarding billboard posters pulsating with Material Promise.
But Sawtell’s chilling assemblies aren’t imaginary: all of their components are the stuff of the real world – industrial softwares and hardwares from “The Contemporary Global Arcade”. It’s all out there (and in here) for the taking, in “The Province of Accumulation”. And what better way, Sawtell suggests, than to let the picture machines do the taking and the making – “All image capture, manipulation or slicing is made by the screen used as a lens.”
Text by William A Ewing