Sometimes you pray the floor will swallow you. But, there you are, exposed, on the surface, upright, with nowhere to go, stupid, dumb, alone. Sometimes you want to crawl in a hole, curl up in the dark, pretend you're dead. Either way, you want to disappear, instantly; you seek the-below. Architecture is called on, pleaded with, to take care of feeling, to help despair's body. It's a beautiful, impossible, role.

Ariane Epars hinted at what awaits on the other side of 'swallow' and 'crawl' - and it's not comforting. Instead, the space beneath the floor looks like a passage to another difficult state, rather than a state itself, let alone a healing state. It's where more swallowing/crawling must be done, as there the remains of 'forever' reside. (And they certainly won't let 'you' stay with them ... bad luck.)

Jonathon Dady began the Domus project outside - an investigative project which could be endless; it reveals 'research' - by drawing the structure of the gallery beyond itself, stretching its smallness, pulling it into place and erasing its now-place; this joyful steely explication cast a shadow over the house, sort of rendered it an ever-receding edifice which holds, offers, a precious activity. Dady's sculpture swayed, swaggered, forward to tell you, alert you, pleasure you.

Epars's assuaged this pleasure, 'drew' it inward and down. She rhythmically cut-out floor boards in the gallery, and calmly lit a few places. It was so compellingly different that one bent, knelt, whereas one was climbing, craning, with Dady. This was pleasure of another kind.

The 'difference' is not difference of effect/affect alone, but difference of attention, complexity, exploration. Each was directive, perceptive - a doubling approach which overlapped, interfered. They are not comparative; they were 'research' which took flight, which got beyond itself immediately (through fascination perhaps).

Dady imagined an ethereal future, Epars imagined a past which was, for that time, ethereal. Epars confirmed Dady's (solid) ethereality, and took it on; without making any overt announcements, she played the next movement. There was no continuity, there was just the next event. The next event was a diagram, like/unlike the last event. You could map Epars's work, and from it plan another building.

Her work raised the question: what is below (and what is be-low, when 'be' can mean 'being' or 'I am' or 'about'; 'low' means lying down, flatness), below my feet (when I walk what happens under surfaces); or, what surfaces lie below the surface I now see and move across - physically, philosophically, psychologically. What does it mean to light up a minute segment of the earth, dry grains, on which no feet have trodden for a century, but which has heard the sound of footsteps for as long? How does the earth feel about this encasing, this constant dark? Have the stones which support the rooms, silent, hidden, and over which living has and is going on, absorbed the vibrating sound as song? Will the stones begin one day to whisper back our footsteps (that is, start singing). It's disturbing. Building is disturbing. Making a house, whatever, entails a huge forgetting - not least of time, of what time's fabric is, becomes, and remains as a taking/taken-place. An accumulating duration. A now which does not wait, doesn't even consider waiting, yet composes, decomposes, recomposes, and in so doing composes anew. Now/then, as we looked, and contemplated the space - the gap between our bodies and the ground, the banality, the greyness, the lack, or so it seemed, of creatures (spiders, beetles, ants, rats; is it so dreadful in the shallow depths, is it so airless and dull, that even security is repulsive), and smelt the slight sweetness of paddocks, witnessed the depth of the cellar - it was clear, composing has been, is, going on (and she crawls under the floor, scrapes the earth into new arrangements, speeds up de-composing).

Epars's history of exhibitions are consistent in their translation of space. Her interventions are cheeky, funny (and almost querulous); they set up propositions for thinking. Dady's was also a proposition: what is a drawing? why? how can drawing dance? This thinking must be within (is 'within' place?) the unknown. Which is strange, as it arises at the very moment of working with (taking issue with) the well-known. Place. House. Art. Space. This is difficult, like sawing through a floor, or erecting scaffold. It's physical, this thinking. (I won't get there, but it's worth attempting.) The way art finishes is an illusion. Dady's strict concise-like structure and Epars's poetic lines and light seem resolute; and yet they only begin at their 'finish'. Not in literal terms of 'us', audience, who are their (new) makers, mis-makers. I mean the work itself has to take off when 'they' walk away. It's 'their' dilemma too. You can't trust scaffold or darkness (or upness or downness); they demand respect. The artists can walk away all they like, but the 'drawings' remain, the empty-volume and the empty-below wait and watch. They are trouble. Artworks like these are trouble. They un-do, they challenge habits, routines. They suggest without a hint of conclusion; instead, splits, twists, folds. (In the works of Epars and Dady social space is investigated; it is not represented or answered, it moves in many ways at once, below/beyond, confined/dispersed, inside/outside, pleasures/pleasures. The works make no statements, and are not mute, on the contrary, they are 'contrary' and 'vocal' (or have voice, or provide space for voice).) They work with known geometries of verticals and horizontals, yet they produce invisible geometries of cuts, breaks, falls - transversals. (I wish I could see what these look like, as they are implied in conservative built-form; I can only wish this because the works invited thinking about both the-there and the-not-there, the real and the virtual.)

Epars's could be day-to-day work, but it's not, it's work from time-spent (or spent-time, exhausted-time), from a specific concentrated duration, which is contextually out-of-time, and due to time, finally, compressed. This is a great chance, a pressured limitation. What to do? 'Stranger, At Strange Place: Beware.' The body comes into play. The body plays itself into place. She lifts the floor boards, squashes herself to meet the dead-line(s).

Notes
1. Emily Dickinson, A Choice of Emily Dickinson's Verse, selected by Ted Hughes, Faber and Faber, London, 1986: 33
2. The Domus project is curated by Alan Cruickshank, Director of the CACSA, and Epars's exhibition is the second in a series of three: a collaboration between Joan Grounds and Stevie Wishart follows.
3. See Annie Dillard, Teaching A Stone To Talk, in the book of the same name, Picador, London, 1982
4. What possesses people to change everything, to begin again, to knock down walls, brick-in windows, remove fireplaces, what madness creeps into the soil/soul.
5. see Luce Irigaray, In Almost Absolute Silence in I Love To You, Sketch of a Felicity in History, trans. Alison Martin, Routledge, NY & London
6. see Giorgio Agamben, Whatever in The Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1993
7. see Michael Tawa, Makeshift Stalls, in Broadsheet, vol 28 no 4, Adelaide, 2000: 27/28
8. see Maurice Blanchot, The Madness Of The Day, trans. Lydia Davis, Station Hill Press, NY, 1981


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