101 Ways to Stare At A Wall | Sharmila Nezovic

Sharmila Nezovic is a thinker. An artist who layers ideas on inspirations and metaphors, who intersperses themes from across her lifetime of artmaking into curious installations. A one-time event, 101 Ways to Stare at a Wall is simultaneously a critique of our over-urbanised lives, hemmed in by the endless cemented infrastructure of modern cities, and also a kind of love letter to the hidden beauty of accidental architecture and human place-making.

Nezovic opens by explaining her love of chance-driven creation. The tyranny of choice is a modern trap, spoiled by the bounty of possibility in the world we find ourselves rocking in supermarket aisles torn between choosing from eighty types of sugar. Sharmila is deeply inspired by the work of John Cage, who used complex methodologies including the use of I Ching to remove ego from compositional decision making, to see what sounds were offered through chance-driven directives.

This performance is accompanied by an original sound track by sound artist, Gabriel Nezovic, who on Sharmila’s encouragement also used a chance-driven compositional framework.

““I’ve collected a bunch of different samples & sounds, ranging from industrial sounds to cityscape noises, to natural sounds – from manufactured to organic.

“In discussion with Sharmila, who offered a nice loose structure as a basis to work with including using different approaches to Chance, I came up with the idea to play the sounds back in random order and to randomise each sound’s duration – building a Sound Scape that evolves on its own.

“Then, to combine those along with some synthesised sounds – to create moods and ‘spaces’ that feel familiar, yet can also be surprising.”

The final element of unknown (before leading into the artist’s actual performance) was the provision of materials for making your own artwork in response to the room. A range of materials were offered, alongside dice, and simple instructions for creating a collage that was limited by chance. A roll of dice told you to use paper or plastic, offered coloured pens of one type or another, hence providing a palette of limitation for creating a new piece. It is a fabulous way to create, being that the imagination loves a small space; it explores it more thoroughly, seeking every dusty corner and ounce of possibility, in a way that it cannot when given free range of the entirety of imagination. The audience enthusiastically participated in art-making, some leaping in to collage before so much as the first element of the performance art was presented.

Nezovic traversed the room, a set which included four small ‘stages’, each set with a mat marked with the cardinal directions, a plastic-covered bin, and a piece of electronic equipment. Nezovic moves between each ‘station’ reading out a list of observations. The observations were of one-hundred-and-one pieces of wall that had stopped her in her tracks because they offered some accidental beauty, accidental architectural intrigue. Such as the range of cracks between differing materials on a wall under a bridge forming a pattern, or a dappling of light on strange textured surface, a piece of graffiti or public art in an unlikely location. The direction she faced, her tempo and volume, pre-determined by the rolling of dice, over and over again, creating her script and direction with chance-driven directives.

Sometimes we could here her clearly, other times not at all. The audience looped in close on occasion, others sat in one location art-making for the duration, each finding a comfortable way to engage as suited their energies.

She traversed the room to each location once, and then looped again, this second time stopping to pour a bin of building material on the floor, and violently destroy the technology with a hammer. A phone, a laptop, shatterd and left behind in a monument to needlessness. Slowly removing pieces of her sensible & prim conductor-esque outfit, until she was brightly coloured and disarrayed.  

It was beautiful to consider really, like that element of contemporary life so beautifully highlighted in the seminal scene in the film American Beauty, where we find our eye always seeking the aesthetic within the constraints of the plastic and cement-hewn urban world in which now love. This was a critique of that industrialised, urbanised, un-human world, but it was also a love letter to it. A call-to-arms, to seek the fragile accidental beauty wherever it can be found.

This is a challenging review, in that reviews are often a quick repost to capture an immediate response to a piece of art. This is a piece of work that has many layers and builds on many years of thoughts; it is almost impossible to capture that complexity that quickly. It deserves a repost in a month, a year, after reflection has taken place, after the work settles in the body and changes my direction slowly, irrevocably.

For all that, my lasting impression is one of acceptance. I have a longing to sit for a long time, to walk slowly, seeking the gentleness in cornices, the vibrance in guttering, the juxtaposition in roadside verges and industrial sites.