Chrine

25.01.13 – 22.02.13

Private View: 24.01.13 | 6-10 pm

An evening of dissonant accord and cacophonous composition with CLINKER BABBAGE: 08.02.13 | 6 – 9 pm

Block 336 is pleased to present Chrine, the latest and most ambitious work to date by Morley Hill. Nestled in the basement of Block 336’s Brutalist exhibition space and looming out of the darkness, Chrine is a graveyard of wooden skeletal forms, stilted mechanical monuments to the forgotten triumphs of Modernity.

As we walk through the gallery, full-size flat-packed Satellites stare nonchalantly down upon us. Wind turbines stand strangely aloof whilst Signalling Towers signal nothing but self-redundancy. Lurking fragments of aviation hardware struggle to stand up to their overblown reputations.  Here we are amongst the frontrunners of yesterday’s tomorrow, forgotten heroes from a lost age of childhood wonderment and Modern technological aspiration.

Assembled throughout a three-month residency within the gallery space, there is an almost frightening obsession at work here. Although Chrine extends the vocabulary of prior investigations, the work began with no plan and only reaches its conclusion as the exhibition opens for display. In fact, the artist suggests that Chrine is as much the name for the process of making the work, as it is a name for the work itself; it is a ‘learning wood’, a practice of ‘problem solving’ and a ‘discovery of how to be useful’.

The timber in Chrine has been reclaimed from the streets of South London, and it bares the scars of its recent past. Bits of babies’ cots butt up against scaffolding planks in a collective effort to become something new, something sacred. Chrine is a troublesome revisionist restoration of the stuff we no longer want, but can’t bring ourselves to throw away.

Hubble telescope meets garden shed, Chrine is high-energy melancholic forgetting machine that spins the wheels of our childhood imaginations, sorrowful pasts.