Wall John Frankland

An AHF commission

Feb 12 – March 7 2009

Wall by John Frankland is art house foundation’s first commission. A wall in the upstairs space of Art House, the renovated school keeper’s house occupied by art house foundation, needed resurfacing following the removal of the previous show. We approached John to plaster it for us as a commission intending to open it to the public and then allow it to remain to function as one of the walls in the upstairs room.

Perhaps a natural progression from the illusory solidity of You Can't Touch This 1993 and What You Lookin' At 1996 and his installation Peer 2006 which saw him subtley extend the internal walls of the gallery out into the street , Wall challenges its audience in a similar way to Boulder 2008. The viewer is presented with a white wall, its identity revealed by the slight physical separation from the rest of the room in the form of a gap around all four edges and also its emptiness. It is the only wall in the house to have nothing on it at all.

The 4 hour process of plastering was captured on time lapse film by Chris Dorley Brown which he and John condensed into a largely unedited 4 min 10 second film complete with cups of tea and the sausage sandwich consumed at lunchtime. As John is accustomed to working while listening to music he went through his ipod and found all the songs of corresponding length, an inevitably eclectic selection, and used these as a soundtrack with one song playing for each loop of the film. We played this film continuously downstairs so the experience of viewing Wall included the soundtrack from John’s ipod.