Open House

I travelled to Agnes So’s Family Home last night in a big group of friends. We all arrived in a noisy boom of jokes and slamming doors, but So’s exhibition, titled ‘Open House’, hit me with such a force of silence, I felt embarrassed.
So and her family recently moved out of their town house in Ellerslie, Auckland. Using the empty shell as an opportunity to stage an exhibition of her recent work, she responded to the void with pieces that reflected the delicate balance of passing and anticipation, held like a breath in the vacant space.

Upon entering the house we were greeted by a slip of paper requesting that we remove our shoes and delivering a sensitive menu of spacial prose. This quiet offering preceded a warm light emanating from the cave like space of the front room. This was no space for a noisy opening of sorts. A beeline for the drinks table out the back of the house would defile the atmosphere.

The show, spanning through several rooms of the house, took the form of an installation, including video, found objects, planks of new pine, sound and rolls of typed graph paper. The most interesting of which was the show’s opener, where brilliant use of the light fittings illuminated an elegant stack of carefully balanced objects. This prompted close scrutiny by all.

The rooms upstairs proved harder to read, with some complicated relationships developing between the rooms. A wireless headset in what seemed to be a 2nd bedroom was linked up to an analogue recorder in the main bedroom. The soundtrack featured tack tacking of a type writer being worked, presumably on the rolls of typed graph paper included in various works around the house. This linked it all together for me. A cacophony of machinations and process’s, emanated through the house, filled the vacant hole with life. Though outside the headset, everything was silent again. A house waiting to be known.

- Amber Claire Pearson