Lise Kjaer and Andrea Gregson, Transformation / Gallery XXI, Warsaw
Slawomir Marzec
Lise Kjaer and Andrea Gregson met in Poland in the 1980s at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. Their friendship lasted the tides of time and their separate ways in the world (Lise lives in New York, Andrea in London). Recently the two decided to reconnect with the time they both lived in a different country, developing a collaborative project, "Transformation," for Galler XXI in Warsaw.
The gallery consists of two rooms. The white walls of the long rectangular space–the main gallery area–are covered with white paper letters attached to the walls at eye level. The piece Untitled (Have No Fear), made by Lise, is a subtle white-on-white installation consisting of fragments of text written by Mahatma Gandhi, Ralph Emerson, Albert Einstein and Mother Teresa. Some of the letters are missing from the text, and instead lie loosely on the floor. One can nevertheless read and reconstruct the sentences, which are focused on friendship and tolerance. Is the scattered condition of quotations a sign of fall, or perhaps a call for maintaining succession? The central part of the room is fulfilled by Andrea`s Headspace, a miniature hallway that repeats the gallery proportions to a smaller scale. The work is essentially a wooden box placed on high wooden legs, allowing you to look into its white interior walls through little viewing holes. A small unidentifiable world of white ceramic forms, appear friendly and subtle, like paramedical devices or perhaps an obscure dollhouse with elongated furniture for whimsical and imaginary figures. There is however a distinct viewing point in the open ends of the hallway, from which the intimate events take form as a path, a ritualistic passage, or psychological clinic.
A much smaller room in the back of the gallery is submerged in semi-darkness and filled with a circle of pillows lying on the floor. Each pillow has a separate colored light projected onto it and anybody can choose to walk in and contemplate beneath their favorite color, another element perceptible of Lise’s specific pedagogy. The work doesn’t teach through single-minded statements, it doesn’t provoke, nor lecture. Instead it takes form as a gathering, unselfish co-existence; a hope for friendship, or whole-heartedness. Or as Hannah Arendt once very fittingly expressed it, culture is "an attitude full of love for care."
