GLASS PUZZLE Exhibition Opens, Today

I called the work 'Glass Puzzle' because it was a puzzle in space. I was interested in making a sensual space. It's also a puzzle about two women, about whom there is no explanation. - Joan Jonas.

One version of an event is like a body without a shadow. If we flip our idea of the split, from Freud (division from trauma) or Janet (retreat from hysteria), instead of a psychic break we arrive at a fracturing whole, shifting into versions and variations as a natural tear along the lines of the self: a puzzle. A game of mimesis, with rules and logic but no goal. At the start of the game a split occurs, one body-one performer-into two. The self scatters, and in that moment a gap is formed, between the mirror (the screen) and the double (the self). A glass puzzle plays with that gap, exploits it. It splits, then works to conceal the split, picks up a mask to substitute one for another, a surrogate. A glass puzzle is a puzzle in space-perpetually pieced back together, never completing itself. Taking its title from Joan Jonas's 1973/74 video work, Glass Puzzle, the exhibition brings together artists working with the logic of rules, substitution, artifact and repetition. - Mary Simpson