A L E X G A W R O N S K I

Alex Gawronski, Trouble Every Day, 2019

(Plywood, timber, acrylic and enamel paint, door handles, hinges, stainless steel letter box, fluorescent lights, Perspex, acrylic signage, telephone adaptor, collected detritus)

 KNULP, Camperdown, Sydney, NSW.

Based on an actual corridor space proximal to where I live, inserted into the gallery this prosaic corridor assumes an uncanny identity: leading right up to the gallery window which functions now as a dead end, there is no entrance or exit, miscellaneous detritus lies strewn before the closed door as if blown there by the wind, except there is no logical way that this could have happened. The original corridor, which I pass on a fairly daily basis, invites entry – lights are always on, it is never closed to the street – and yet it is always abandoned like  a relic from another place and time. No one exits and no one enters. This sense of already having-been and of having fallen out of time transforms this ‘real’ space into an equally imaginary space, its emptiness encourages fantasy.

It is perhaps akin in this way to the more prosaic images of urban Paris by turn of the Century French photographer Eugene Atget, or even maybe the Metaphysical paintings of Giorgio de Chirico in which the active human world seems to have permanently receded. Overall, the forlorn nature of this recreated urban space speaks of distress, a lack of care. When we are faced with trouble in our daily lives often it is in the secondary virtualised form of televisual information about distant events – wars, murders, catastrophes, natural disasters. Yet much that precipitates Big Trouble in the world – envy, bad blood, false consciousness, ineptitude, bias – goes unseen and unnoticed behind closed doors. Private dramas, tragedies even, are never only private: someone suddenly destituted by foolish belief in the fairness and naturalness of the economic order which inescapably envelops us, attests to so many others who have faced the same fate whether through misdeed, naivety or exploitation.