Public artwork for The Lightship at Ports of Auckland
Video shot on an infrared camera for a 110 x 13m LED screen.

November 2022 – March 2023

Thresholds; Sonya Lacey and Maria Olsen
Curated by Simon Gennard

Part of Several degrees of attention at Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, July–November 2022

Totally Dark
Dunedin Public Art Gallery
6 August – 14 November 2021

With off-site work Totally Dark (Chlorophyll)
Favour Ōtepoti
5 August – 20 October 2021

Obstructions, 2020, two-channel digital video from 16mm film, 10min, silent

Dissolves, 2020, four-channel digital video from 16mm film, 4min, silent

Dissolve, 2020, giclée print on photo rag paper, 42.5 x 50cm

Shown at Robert Heald Gallery 1.8.20 — 22.8.20

Bathers presents footage shot at four pools located throughout the Wellington district: Freyberg Pools (Oriental Bay); Karori Swimming Pool; Tawa Pool; and the Wellington Aquatic Centre (Kilbirnie). Filmed in April when access to these facilities was prevented due to COVID-19 level four lockdown conditions, each work presents a range of vantage points captured from the exterior of these pools by Lacey on a 16mm Bolex camera.

In each work the footage is placed under specific stresses. In the four-channel work Dissolves, bands of colour slowly appear across each image. An incremental editorial dissolve is continually being enacted on each frame yet is never quite completed. Hues eventually register as softly focused surfaces, the bokeh of the lens and faint reflections of outdoor scenes. Through their static quality, the doubling of images heightens subtle murmurs of activity in each scene: a ripple of exposed surface water between pool covers, a jet of water bubbling to the surface, and what appears to be the flicker of a shutter or some other mechanical aberration. Each image is bathed in morning light, yet the unique combination of tones generated by the layering of transparent images introduces a toxic palette of colours which hints at the threat of contamination.

In the corresponding two-channel work Obstructions, new views of the same complexes are presented as images that have been irreverently cropped into a portrait format, making the film grain more pronounced. These micro views of the analogue footage allow Lacey to introduce different movements—to mechanically track across a static frame as if to survey a scene through a telescopic lens, as well as to emphasise the ways the architecture continually impedes and frames her point of view. In the reflections of some images there are intimations of recreational activities occurring nearby, people walking on the street, and so on. Considering the broad hours of access to these public facilities patrons typically enjoy, the unpeopled condition of these pools represents a series of impossible images under normal circumstances.

The final framed image, Dissolve, recalls two stills that we recognise from the four-channel work Dissolves. Retrieved from portions of the footage edited out of the moving image work, these high-fidelity scans are the most distressed images in the exhibition, being overexposed and showing signs of faulty chemical processing.

These chance-generated qualities recall Lacey’s interest in dissolving images through her process of washing and bleeding newspaper ink for Literals, her most recent exhibition at Robert Heald Gallery, and Weekend at The Dowse Art Museum (both 2018). While the works in this current exhibition document local recreational facilities under specific conditions, both the subject of public pools and the title ‘Bathers’ make direct connections back to these prior exhibitions. The former works took interest in the history and social aspirations of the St Bride Foundation, founded in 1891 to provide leisure facilities and better the lives of workers in Fleet Street, London’s best-known newspaper and printing district. As well as their social imperative, Lacey was also interested in the infamous uncleanliness of the pools, which eventually contributed to their closure and the repurposing of the complex. Weekend included both murky abstractions developed out of these stories and still images of the pools which she captured in person in their current state, boarded off from the public.

As if to perform an inversion, this new body of locally sourced footage depicts the opposite situation. These highly sanitised and pristine pools are seen barred from public access during a time when social distancing was instated to contain community spread of the COVID-19 virus. In this new work, it is the interior that is preserved, while the exterior is subject to a communicable virus. Filmed in this state of being provisionally cordoned off from public use, it’s no mistake that the editorial trope which Lacey has applied to this footage has also shifted. For the former, Lacey employed the ‘wipe’, which within her footage was slowed in order to draw a physical analogy, a desire to clean, to sterilise, and to sanitise. In this instance, the centrepiece of the exhibition focuses on another editorial trope—the ‘dissolve’, which seems not only to be motivated by a formal enquiry into how a typically fleeting editing technique might be isolated, slowed and thereby greatly enlarged in an almost gestural manner, but might also be read as a slow spread or advancing contagion, a meditation on the fear that even the slightest trace of a defective molecule could undo the large-scale infrastructure deployed to contain the transmission of an invisible agent.

— Stephen Cleland, July 2020

Pillows

Three channel 16mm film transferred to HD video (no sound)
2020

Commissioned by Asian Film Archive for State of Motion 2020: Rushes of Time. Made with support from Asian Film Archive, NTU CCA Singapore and Creative New Zealand.
Subsequently shown at Paludal gallery, Christchurch.

“Sonya Lacey filmed parts of Pillows over a week she spent in Cambodia, a short flight from Singapore where she had a residency in 2017. On the way back, while Lacey was going through airport customs to re-enter Singapore, border control inspected her luggage and found her 16mm camera. The customs agent, thinking something suspicious could be going on with it, opened up the camera and exposed, so ruining, the film housed inside.

The ruined film was one of a series of reels that Lacey had shot inside an offset printing factory in Cambodia. It was of a man, presumably someone who worked at the factory, having a nap on a pile of thick, freshly printed, probably quite dreary, Government legislation documents. Sleeping in public is quite a vulnerable thing to do—sleeping in public while at your workplace is both quite vulnerable and also pretty subversive. It’s fitting that the film ended up being destroyed by a state employee who was just doing their job, even if it was unintentional.”

Excerpt from Simon Palenski’s exhibition text for Pillows,
Paludal gallery, Christchurch

Weekend was included in SOLO,
The Dowse Art Museum
November 2018 - March 2019

Newspaper (for bathers, weekend)
Four channel moving image
16mm transferred to digital video
24/22/28/24 minutes
2018

Weekend
16mm colour film, 10 minutes, silent
2018

Edit, cuttings
Washed and collaged newspaper, conservation tape
2018

Second class bathing (St Bride Foundation Swimming Pool)
Printed stills formatted into publication pages
2018, ongoing

Lightweights
Water-cut brass
2018

“…Drawing all these elements together was the story of the St Bride Foundation in London, and its Victorian era swimming pool that was once used by employees from the nearby newspaper printing industry. The beautifully abstracted works that Lacey developed from this established a poetic relationship between water and printing. Although the narrative was grounded in the past, Weekend evoked ideas around the contemporary dissemination and flow of information, the fluidity of language itself, and our current modes of communication.

The correlation between water and print began for Lacey after learning of and filming the disused swimming pool in the basement of the St Bride Foundation. Established in 1891, the Foundation originally provided a place for employees from the Fleet Street publishing industry to relax and socialise. Workers from the newspaper printers would immerse themselves in this murky swimming pool, washing off the residual ink and news of the day. However, the hygiene of the pool was always a little questionable and from the late-1960s it sat unused, until in 1994 the Bridewell Theatre was erected literally in its place. The wooden foundations for the theatre stage were built in the floor of the pool and the stage rested above, covering the pool surface in place of water. Lacey filmed beneath this as research for Weekend, documenting the pool tiles visible just beyond the wooden supports, offering a glimpse of this subterranean history. Known for printing and publishing since the sixteenth century, gentrification of central London in the 1980s pushed the print industry to cheaper manufacturing premises in the outskirts of the city, and the St Bride Foundation now acts as an archive for graphic design and publishing.

Transforming this history, Lacey washed sheets of the local newspaper until the content dissolved, turning newsworthy images and articles into abstract forms of muted, grainy colour. She then reconfigured these into reformatted newspaper works, albeit now void of image or text; and shot them as 16mm film segments, slowly panning over the paper to reveal the richly textured surface that was a result of its submersion in water. This process of translation and mediation follows her ongoing interest in the fluidity of language and the instability of information systems…”

Excerpt of exhibition text by Melanie Oliver

Literals
Robert Heald Gallery
September 2018

Newspaper (for bathers, before work / after work)
Three-channel digital video from 16mm film
14min / 10min 30sec / 12min

Wipe I – III
Washed newspaper, conservation tape
210x145mm
2018

Two channel Super 8mm film transfer
and Pages (after Cooper), brass, 290 x 210mm
Shown at Robert Heald Gallery, 2017
Documentation by Shaun Waugh

Writing by Hamish Win excerpted here:

“…A small delay, but that is precisely what synaesthesia does. It takes some sense and makes it another. Makes a home from one instant and tropes it, spins it into another web of feeling, of likeness. To trope is to turn, to turn topos on its head. To spin it around. To mix. Which is precisely what Sonya Lacey’s latest show does. In fact it is very much like an echo chamber, a dalliance with commingled senses. Light refracts. Actually a transmittable image refracts, an image is photographed then made into a sign, a sign that fragments, that spins. You stand in a room full of fragments, of books, of catalogues, images which have been filmed, which have been set in motion. Subjects overlap, one page bleeds through onto another, just as Lacey’s dual screens similarly replicate the process. It is palimpsestic, but it is also method. There is a clarity of the image, and then a mutating of the senses.

This echo is reinforced by the small cut-out sculptures which are housed to the side of the projection on a chest high steel plinth. Named after Muriel Cooper,(iii) these brass miniatures, replicate the page layouts she pioneered. Fragile, rendered in negative, absent of content, they are pure mechanism. They project a forthright clarity, an intent of purpose and yet they are very much like awards. Like little plaques. Commemorations. Such melancholy is no doubt inflected by Lacey’s Newspaper for Vignelli (2010) where she printed Massimo Vignelli's rejected redesign of a European Journal, and filmed the broadsheet blowing in the wind. Like that tumbling, ambulatory waltz, always falling short of pure legibility, Lacey’s plaques for Cooper are similarly concerned with a prototypical moment of design’s evolution. So much so that standing in her latest exhibition is akin to standing in an echo chamber, momentarily enveloped by reverberation, by the bifurcation of history’s unstoppable asymmetrical flow.”

Infinitesimals is a three channel video work shot primarily across two locations; a homeopath's laboratory and one of the last remaining type casting foundries in the world. The work imagines a scenario whereby a piece of lead type is diluted and ingested according to homeopathic methods. 

The video is accompanied by a musical score performed by Glen Downie and Christopher Wratt, and is narrated by Sophie Thorn. 

Dilutions is a sculptural work that involves the production of a new movable metal typeface. Originally designed for road signs, MoT Serif was a hand drawn typeface made by David Kindersley in 1956 in response to increasing speed of automobiles. It was designed to be legible at high speed rather than according to aesthetic rules, and as such is idiosyncratic and at times clumsy. Although proven to be highly effective it wasn't deployed as it didn't visually represent the politics of the era. In this work the metal alloy has been modified and corroded to soften the metal so that it will visually deteriorate with every use. 

Excerpt of The Berlin Wall is a Remedy, Abby Cunnane:
“The principle of succussion—the shaking or pulsing of the chemical solution—works by transference. What is transferred into the water retains no trace of the original substance, it is the ‘information, not the material’ that passes from one to the other. In the bruising action of succussion—so like ‘percussion’ as you say it, feel it hush in your mouth—the material is rearranged as something else. It’s a disruption of organisational principles, a material rearrangement with vivid precedents in narrative fiction. (Someone should read this to you; it’s from a story about meteorites, but it’s also about sculpture, and probably about someone you both know: ‘She would crumple the layers of sedimentary rocks into synclines and anticlines, she would change the orientation on faces of crystals and obtain walls of feldspar, quartz, mica or slate, and between one layer and another she would hide marine fossils at different heights in order of date.’

Sonya is casting 60-point metal letter-type, using a typeface originally designed to be read at high speed from the motorways of 1950s Britain.5 To make the type she uses tin and lead, and antimony. Even at maximum dilution, and at an infinite distance from the metals they begin as, these are heavy remedies. As metaphors, they weight the language. Primo Levi writes as a chemist about lead as ‘the metal of death.’6 I think of it as the weight of a fishing sinker in your hand, an exact measure of gravity as is sits in your palm, something which sinks according to the straightest line down. Like-with-like, lead (Plumbum Metallicum) is used by homeopathists in third to thirtieth potency to treat sluggishness of the muscles. I don’t know if your muscles are sluggish, if you type as I do, one shoulder turned away like you’re about to leave the room. No one said you should try metal type as a remedy. So you know though, it tastes like the dentist, the 1980s amalgam fillings, before fluoride was part of the municipal water supply. Dilute it more, it tastes like an asthma inhaler.”

Infinitesimals was exhibited at The Engine Room (Massey University, Wellington)

Dilutions and Infinitesimals is to be exhibited at The Physics Room (Christchurch)

Abby Cunnane's writing The Berlin Wall is a Remedy can be downloaded here: The Engine Room

By Sea, HD video, 2015

By Sea tells the story of a fictional seaside apartment building. The architecture of the complex forms the words Par Mer, written in a bold, italic typeface. 

Most filming takes place inside an architectural model built out of cast salt.  

Camerawork by Campbell Farquhar and Sonya Lacey
Narration by Fuyuko Akiyoshi
Music by Johnny Chang: folk music background (excerpt)
With thanks to Stephen Cleland

Excerpt from Sonya Lacey: By Sea, Elyssia Bugg

“Salt, like memory, preserves through a process of permeation — altering the structure of its ‘host’ while acting to retain some essential, singular quality. In the landscape of Sonya Lacey’s By Sea, salt fills the gaps and fissures opened up by the erosion that it has set in motion. The architectural space through which the camera glides shows the cumulative result of this process. Each passageway is translucent, constructed of cast salt that appears blemished and brittle when in close-up and in focus.

This imagery sits in uneasy accord with fragmentary narrative pieces afforded to the viewer by voice-over. These shards of information refuse distillation, their loose ends and peculiar tangents circuitously housing the world of the film within a larger set of metaphysical dimensions. We hear of glimpses of life inside a seaside apartment complex where each building forms a letter shape, so that an aerial view elicits the phrase “Par Mer.” We are told that the building is less legible on the inside, that no one knows for sure what it might be like to inhabit anyone else’s living quarters. Despite these challenges, the narrator says, “We resolve to share our partial information.” In these instances, the work’s eerie sense of profundity amplifies such notions beyond the geometric specifics of any one apartment, just as it echoes the conditions and confines of our subjectivity as individuals.”

By Sea was made in response to the writing of Joanna Margaret Paul. It was commissioned by CIRCUIT Artist Film and Video Aotearoa with support from Creative New Zealand.

A series of images found both online and from print publications, reproduced using an airbrush. 

Excerpt from A SHIRT IS A, Simon Gennard

“The narrator’s units of measurement, into which things are abstracted and reduced, always find themselves inadequate. Things pile up, and spill out, and burst. The story is a problem. Money and its relation to time is a problem. The object and its restlessness, and its inability to remain still and orderly and neat is a problem. The object exceeds its measurement. It contains layers that make it hostile to being accounted for.

Sonya Lacey’s airbrushed images are made of layers. Images — mostly of seemingly benign objects, mostly bearing no obvious relation to one another — are plucked from imageboards, or magazines, or search engines, and broken down into dozens of grey tones. There’s a dustiness to them, as if we encounter the objects through a screen of television static, or film grain in low light. If the images were broken down, layer by layer, what would we see? Mostly abstractions in negative space, on a sheet of acetate, or a linen screen. Sometimes whole blocks of negative space, with a few speckles to let light through. We would see units that don’t appear to be anything at all, but when piled on top of each other, become immediately familiar. So what appears benign — a shirt, cut metal, a pair of sunglasses — only appears so from a distance. The legibility of these images conceals the unreadable, sometimes surprising, components from which they are made.”

Shown at Te Tuhi 
And Robert Heald

Newspaper for Vignelli
16mm film (black and white) transferred to HD video

Reproduction / extrapolation of Massimo Vignelli's rejected redesign of the European Journal, printed and filmed. 

Full video can be viewed on CIRCUIT

Camerawork by Stuart Page
With thanks to Stephen Cleland, Cherie Lacey and James Winter

Shown at:
The Adam Art Gallery 
The Physics Room
Robert Heald Gallery

A selection of work from 2007-2009