Alek O.: The Thing

Alek O., The Thing, Room Two. Courtesy the artist and Gallery Vela, London

Alek O. The Thing

Gallery Vela, London

13 October - 13 November

By Laura McLean-Ferris

It’s difficult to overcome the cloying nostalgia of the well-loved item placed in an artwork: toys, clothes, family memorabilia. However, it often seems to be the case that objects of the everyday are lifted into a different register when subjected to some kind of obscure rational regimen or system. As soon as we see loved items treated as formal objects, the emotional resonance of the work reasserts itself, and is made strange. Mike Kelley’s many works comprising handmade stuffed toys that are measured and arranged according to size and colour are a case in point. Alek O.’s exhibition The Thing, at the recently opened Gallery Vela, employs this strategy at an intrinsic level. Rather than categorising personal objects (items of clothing, for example), the artist makes structural changes to ‘the thing’ itself.

Here, then, a selection of rather ordinary shirts are unstitched at the seams and resewn systematically into large squares, so that they appear like canvases. Each work is named after the shirt’s owner: Roberto (2010) forms a larger square than Anna (2010), while the shirt used to make Carolina and Clara (2010) clearly had two owners (one can’t help but imagine hand-me-downs among sisters). Underarm seams are moved to the centre of the square, so that pale yellow sweat marks look defiantly alive, frozen under archival glass, but they also bring to mind the staining technique of colour-field painters such as Morris Louis and Helen Frankenthaler. Elsewhere mixtapes are categorised by colour and divided into groups of three, and a wooden closet has been broken down into woodchips, mixed with glue as a binding agent and cast into two plinths, while the metal elements – brass and iron – have been melted down into two small rectangles. The glass windows, the remaining part of the closet, lean against them uselessly, the closet now a hermetically sealed space. Everything here is broken down, changed, abstracted and transformed into ‘things’ that look, unquestionably, like art.

Alek O., Ayrton Senna (2010) Courtesy the artist and Gallery Vela, London

Two pieces are made from old jumpers owned by the artist, which have been broken down and remade one stitch at a time. The jumpers are unravelled in a neat, orderly fashion (top to bottom, sleeves first…) and then embroidered as a rectangular wall piece in regular rows, left to right, in the exact order in which they were unpicked. What was once a red jumper with white detailing (snowflakes? stripes?) is now something that looks like a fabric wall-hanging or a prayer mat with some kind of obscure message upon it. O. has titled the work Ayrton Senna after the Brazillian Formula One racing driver who met a dramatic death on the track at the age of thirty-four. The work looks a little like a blurred version of the Marlboro sponsorship that one associates with Formula One racing. On revisiting the story of Senna’s death, however (an event that sticks out in my memory because it seemed to devastate a school friend who idolised the driver), I’m reminded that one of the most unhappy details of this event, tragic in the narrative sense, was the discovery of a rolled-up Austrian flag in Senna’s car that he was hoping to wave as a victory flag if he should win. This was to honour the Austrian driver Roland Ratzenberger, who had been killed in an accident the previous day, reportedly a great source of upset to Senna. With this (perhaps accidental) association in mind, O.’s Ayrton Senna also might seem to resemble an Austrian flag that has been corrupted or damaged somehow. O's work suggests that it is not only stories that can be retold or adapted, but materials themselves. Before we even know where we are, here we are speaking about racing drivers and school crushes, national flags, snowflakes and carpeting. How much potential is there in red and white wool? How long is a piece of string?