Making Marks into Places

Schwaaaaaa! This lettering looms over and names the factory tower in Peter Alwast’s partially rendered 3D representation of a suburban community. Schwaaa is a play on sound - a form of semantic onomatopoeia: it means nothing, but seems to announce the coming of something special. A panoptic display of video footage of suburban vistas, housing estates and park spaces are embedded on ‘monitors’ within the factory’s mainframe, juxtaposing two dimensional and three dimensional settings. The Schwas tower slowly expels these scenes out into the surrounding landscape as biomorphic blobs of seemingly habitable space. The viewer however, remains aware of the place of their gestation, and they take on the contained luminosity of video-surveilled places. It is only a colourful formless blob - containing children’s bodies and voices, and not yet fully socialized - that represent any real sign of life. Isolated and joyful, their presence disrupts the broader aesthetic of a town literally formed and sustained by its corporate centre - they are an aberration in the animation.

The most basic function of the town planner is to turn land – space - into data through surveying, mapping and naming. Set to a frontier soundtrack - ‘The Spirit of the Plains’ - this 3D animation joins with seven beautifully rendered drawings which together reference and toy with the icons, technologies and mythopoetic ontologies of place making. A town-planning software application has been used to construct the animation’s monuments, and render the meaning of ‘community’ upon spaces cartographically, within a kind of virtual terra nullius. Meanwhile the drawings engage with this game engine environment, and the consequences of its aesthetic.

In one of these works, biomorphic cloud structures seemingly visit a calm summer day upon a cartographic design of a suburb. In another, meandering cross-hatched markings, in blue pencil and watercolour, contrast as seeming doodled activities against a pure re-presentation of mainframe architecture. Elsewhere, transparent splatterings of silicone appear like fireworks over vacant planes of underworked paper; and blobs of watercolour paint (an archaic representational media) and MRI images of the human body allude to an inside, and record human gesture. Visioning the scene from different angles, the drawings repeat the animation’s ruptured, anti-formalist aesthetic, continuing a dialogue between geometric design and the excessive presence of the social, between intuitive mark making and process mediated design. Gestural, organic, non-representational markings bring a sense of time and presence – a kind of ‘place’ rendered by the hand - validating the works as drawings, otherwise cartographic in form.

If Alwast gestures towards histories of place making and representation in the ‘South pacific’, he plays neither architect, historian, nor artist in the traditional sense. Painting, drawing and animation are used to interrogate the contribution of human gesture to the construction of meaningful three dimensional spaces within specific media. This is a conceptual inquiry, in so far as the artist’s contentless horizons refuse to allude to any broader perspectival or historical positions for his designs. Place-making happens curiously here, uprooted within the game engine, and the artist is as interested in the specificity of tools and systems of meaning which generate and situate communities, corporations, and nations, as he is with the process of authorship itself.

Rachel O’Reilly