Briefly Noted

Robert Hengeveld’s “Farley’s heap: Casper’s keep”

[September 22^nd-Oct 1^st at the Fifty-fifty Arts Collective]

After spending two years with miniature kitchen stoves and installations that provoke the awkward feeling of “unfinished” construction sites combined with the feeling of organized “stages” inside of nice gallery spaces, my visual perception of the everyday surroundings we are all living in, got turned upside down; followed by his specific sense of humour. This humour that takes an important part in contemporary art making and in the perception of life in general.

In this new installation at the fifty-fifty arts collective, the miniature door on the right to the entrance gives me this giggling feeling inside of my throat and I am just thankful to him that he shows me the world in a different less important manner mixed up with his specific sense of humour…supported by the “construction site cave” that evokes this feeling of ambiguity: On one side, I want to get in action, the performance: to crawl inside, but one the other hand the “cave” is made out of construction site materials: raw, cold, unorganized, un-cozy. The viewer gets stuck in this feeling of ambiguity and isn’t really enthusiastic of crawling inside…. Robert Hengeveld mixes up what we think is “eternal”, the structures we live with in our everyday life, the forms, the views, everything we like to surround us and that give us the feeling of ”stability and security”, in our nests...he is playing with those notions of our actual society, breaking up the ceilings, replacing, this ongoing process of demolishing and constructing, renewing. The ongoing process of real life that some of us have lost in their lives because of too much “materialist security” plus the focus on structures that we dismiss and ignore.

[…] I really don't know what to think about his work...it just seems so self-conscious. What it made me think about was the relationship of works of art and the space or environment they are presented in. Because his pieces are primarily made of discarded construction material like a demolition sight [sic] and the space actually looks like it is in the process of being demolished it makes it difficult to recognize what is the art and what isn't. The concept of presenting building materials as discards or garbage and then seeing what they look like as we see them normally do is in some ways interesting. It also made me think of reversed skeletons or seeing on the outside what we normally don't see. Perhaps that is his point or perhaps it is irrelevant...it was just a reaction and it made me ask myself how I would have received this piece had it been in the Art Gallery of Victoria. Am I really that shallow that the space has that much importance [?]… The place is unattractive and not welcoming in any way but I guess that is pretty superficial of me to think it would or should be […]

- Dan MacDougall (in correspondence w. Xane St. Phillip)