Rojas work was a very nice appetiser for a great (if expensive) lunch in the Zaha Hadid designed Magazine Restaurant that is attached to the main building. There are plenty of fine and obscure foods to be had - but no elephant. The jumbo is instead to be found inside the show. It is life size, head down, supporting a seemingly massively heavy girder. It is emphatically (elephantically ?) part of the space, almost alive despite is Pompeii like earthen exoskeleton.
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| Jumbo |
The creature is beautifully poised. Despite its massive size it just fails to touch the wall it faces - this adds credibility to its mass - the weight falling through head and trunk is credible. The wall itself is made of cracked clay - it is monumental and seemingly ancient. The wall surrounds the gallery’s vaulted spaces, one of which is the exhibits heart. Walking through the portal one I was flooded with references - mostly cinematic. It is like the tombs in Prometheus and the warehouse in Raiders of the Lost Ark; or perhaps some dusty forgotten storeroom in a film studio’s backlot.
Like ants being a super organism the individual pieces inside the space come together to form a bigger whole. This does not feel like a gallery as the space and exhibits are co-dependent. The walls and centre are racks of shelves crammed full of mostly clay artefacts (I chose that word carefully - they look like they have been found or dug up not sculptured). The racks are high - so that that the furthest pieces can only be glimpsed - this re-enforces the sense that we have happened upon a repository, a space that is there not just of us. The individual pieces - and there are hundreds of them - range are mostly clay. Some are exquisite (the tiny song birds are intimately detailed) and some are more crudely formed (the clay hand worked in lumps). There are themes running through them - sci-fi space junk; dead creatures; mostly prone human forms; and occasionally rotting and decaying food (the potatoes are sprouting their creepy tendrils exploring the objects). Each object is fascinating; the whole is more fascinating still.
