On a window ledge at the Approach sat a pair of drinking glasses, one a bit larger than the other, touching each other. They might have been left by a couple of patrons of the downstairs pub who'd wandered upstairs to the gallery, except they looked quite clean and dry. A glance at the gallery checklist showed nothing made of glasses, but 1 thought I'd better ask: Yes, despite lacking a title, date, and list of materials--which I thought every artwork had to have these days--this was Alice Channer's work, if not, perhaps, a work.

As a viewer, you've got to be willing to sweat such details if you want to appreciate Channer's art--but then, for those who appreciate them, the details (and the little puzzlements they entail) are where the pleasure comes in. The same, of course, could be said for those who appreciate a well-tailored suit; the connoisseurship is its own reward. That association is one that Channer would hardly reject: Clothing and personal adornment are constant references in her work. In this show, sculptures made of draped printed fabric were hung from steel brackets on the ceiling, and bronze casts of bangle bracelets were attached to the wall. The three large works on paper were each called Seersucker (all works 2009), while a couple of smaller drawings seemed to depict patterned scarves, folded over. And the show was titled "Worn-Work."

Writing recently about Barbara Hepworth's sculpture garden in Cornwall, Channer describes seeing photographs of Hepworth in which "it is as if she is actually 'wearing' her work. She is inside it, working from an interior perspective and locating herself as an artistthere." By contrast, Channer's own sculpture does not make one immediately think of the artist herself as inhabiting the artworks; rather, she seems to be dressing the architecture. The nearly white Seersucker drawings, sometimes two-layered, with their faint vertical pencil lines and softly wrinkled surfaces (created simply by exposing the paper to water) call attention to the walls to which they are directly affixed by hiding them as much as they draw the gaze to themselves through their subtle sensuality and luminosity. The bangle piece, A Body, Yours or Mine--in which some of the circles have been somewhat flattened, squeezed out of their perfect shape, while others have been broken open--seems to offer the wall as something to be worn by allowing the viewer to imagine her own wrist placed through one of the rings; but by the same token the wall would thereby be wearing the person. The hanging fabric pieces, I Cannot Tell the Difference Between One Thing and Another and (Sleeve), play with a similar reversibility: These works might be highly distilled approaches to the problem Matisse posed in the sculpture Two Negresses, 1908, whose "almost symmetrical arrangement" is described by Lawrence Gowing as "balancing] complementary views, so that from whichever side we look we relate front and back, like aspects of a single figure."

Channer is one of many artists who have proposed a soft or fragile version of Minimalism, but despite the references to fashion, hers is not, like some other artists', a polemically girly take on a putatively masculine period style. She is just as choosy about hardware as Robert Ryman or Donald Judd, and her aesthetic is just as clean-lined and precise as theirs. But more essential is that she shares with the Minimalists what they shared with Matisse: a desire for clarification, as the latter put it, "for the purpose of organization, to put order into my feelings." The value of such order, of course, is dependent on the intensity of those feelings. In Channer's work, the two seem finely matched. --Barry Schwabsky

The most influential example of the pleat in mid-20th-century couture was undoubtedly Christian Dior’s silk ‘Bar’ suit. Launched in 1947 as part of the designer’s début collection – promptly dubbed the ‘New Look’ by Harper’s Bazaar editor Carmel Snow – it marked a shift from postwar austerity to opulent femininity. In 2007, Alice Channer titled her series of room-height works ‘New Look’: elegant and poised, a length of pleated fabric – about a hand-span wide – curves down from the ceiling and trails neatly along the floor. The young London-based artist tells the story of Bridget Riley, who, on the way to an opening in New York during the mid-1960s, was horrified to see an Op art-printed dress displayed in a shop window. How would people ever be able to look at her paintings again? Channer is clearly working with this in mind: as with Now-In (2009), a pair of works from the ‘Scarf Drawings’ series, and Peach New Look (2007), her titles often point to the marketing of the à la mode; to how the sense of ‘the now’ (as well as the past) is both tailored and sold.

Many of Channer’s sculptures and works on paper relate to the wearing and display of clothing or personal adornment. (Fittingly, Showreelproject.com, the Milan space that hosted her most recent solo show, comprises a disused shop-front – what would Riley think?) From the pleated hanging pieces and snaking lines of stretched bronze bangles to drawings traced around a patterned scarf, Channer’s work often alludes to the characteristics of clothing and is littered with limb- or body-sized gaps. Though sometimes large, these works never engulf the viewer: none are freestanding and they are usually made from either paper or fabric – their concern is a poised sense of form rather than brute weight. (Channer, who graduated in sculpture from London’s Royal College of Art in 2008, refers to the metal brackets in the hanging pieces as ‘inverted plinths’.) Barry Schwabsky has noted that Channer ‘seems to be dressing the architecture’, and her approach certainly suggests that she draws an analogy between buildings and bodies. The fabric pieces, for example, are re-cut depending on the size of the gallery, expanding or contracting so as to fit its height. This isn’t just a case of the viewer (or artist) activating the exhibition space; it is something more domestic, to do with lived experience. To ‘dress’ a room – rather than to fill it, say, or to leave it empty – is to alter one’s relationship to it, to treat it like a person.

In a short essay she wrote about Barbara Hepworth’s garden in St Ives (published in The Coelacanth Journal last year), Channer noted how, in photographs of the sculptor, ‘it is as if she is actually “wearing” her work’ – a sense that was echoed in the title of Channer’s 2009 solo show in London at The Approach, ‘Worn-Work’. The large wall pieces included in the exhibition were made from layers of paper to which the artist had applied thin stripes of water (Seersucker, 2009). This has the effect of stretching and contracting lines of the surface, catching the light in the subtle crinkles – pleasingly, these all-white pieces are almost impossible to accurately photograph, spurning mechanical reproduction for required presence. Though mostly sculptural, Channer’s work is often involved with the action of drawing, but rarely in the sense of mark-making on a flat plane. Her additions more frequently infuse the surface – as with Seersucker, or the ‘Scarf Drawings’, in which cigarette ash is rubbed in – and only disclose themselves close-up. Using discarded cigarette butts sets up another type of intimacy, redolent of late-night – perhaps even a little faded – glamour. (It’s worth noting that, for the carefully directed premiere of Dior’s ‘New Look’ collection, models were instructed to knock over ashtrays with their pleated skirts.)

While Channer’s work is full of care for the limits of the exhibition space – tailored to its walls, or cut to fit its ceiling – it also points beyond it, to the events and openings that surround the exhibition. This, however, is usually easy to miss. At the private view of Channer’s solo show, ‘That Make-Up Some Things’, at Associates in London three years ago, I certainly didn’t notice that someone was wearing a dress whose pattern was the basis for one of the exhibition’s spectral prints. I was closer to the mark second time around, at ‘Worn-Work’ last summer. On the window sill of the first-floor gallery space, which is above a pub in east London, two tall glasses were placed side by side. Scanning the list of works, I realized that they weren’t mentioned, yet instead of returning them to the bar – from where they might have strayed – I let them be; they seemed like a good fit. Visitors to the opening of ‘Took My Hands Off Your Eyes Too Soon’, a group show at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in New York in 2007, in which Channer was participating, would perhaps have had to look harder. If they had an eye for detail, though, they may well have spotted that one guest was wearing a 1965 Bridget Riley dress. --Sam Thorne

Cascades of white silk satin drop from ceiling to floor to form Alice Channer's sculpture Tight Skin (all works 2011). Printed on the semitransparent fabric in delicate colors are enlarged images of snakeskin and lizard print, one borrowed from a stretched sleeveless undershirt, the other from a skirt. Set on either side of this curtainlike structure in Channer's recent exhibition "Body Conscious" were two shimmering metal sculptures, each about human height. To the right, Shift is a lean, irregular steel cylinder, sizable enough to conceal a tall person standing inside - a beautiful woman, let's just say. Strange cutouts in the sculpture's edges suggest the curving armholes of paper sewing patterns. Occasional colored elastics are stretched top to bottom; notches cut into the stainless steel on either end fix the trimming in place. Swelling around the bottom lies a flat expanse of pleated fabric, curling around the mirrored edges like a gray pool of thick, metallic liquid. To the left of Tight Skin was the second steel sculpture, Slip, which is screenlike and undulating, with detailing similar to that of Shift. On the wall a thin, curving metal shelf held more pleated polyester, whose varying dyed bands of color create condensed, wavy patterns: The suggestion of gently wavy hair is enhanced by this work's title, Volume and Body.

How often a desirable woman's hair and clothes are equated with water: flowing, shimmering, cascading, falling. Marilyn Monroe's body was once described as having been poured into its skintight lamé gown: the fantasy of woman as infinitely pliable. The sculptured heroines and goddesses of the ancients were draped in fabrics that appeared wet, to render the undulating garments heavier, the shadows deeper. With all the skirts, tops, slips, and dresses lying around the show, its absent center was a female body; but this presumed female was not a 1950s sex symbol, nor a Grecian ideal. She would be a thinking, private person, working through her relationship to the world beginning from the skin and extending outward, stopping first to examine the layer of fabric closest to her, then moving to the immediate space around her, perhaps the auralike cylindrical volume described by Shift.

Just as a body is solid yet mostly liquid, the fabrics cut and shaped to adorn it exist between wet and dry - first dyed in baths, sometimes industrially pleated by steam, then swirling around the body - and yet behave like a thin, dry barrier, protecting the body underneath. Endless transferrals, between flatness and corporeality, dryness and wetness, dematerialization and weight, things slinking and puddling on the floor and others standing coolly upright, were forever at play in the exhibition. In Deep Skin, a hand-drawn snakeskin pattern is rendered on marbled paper - a liquid process wherein the paper is dipped in ink and made to resemble the hard surface of stone: again wet producing dry, the light paper mimicking weighty marble.

Channer's silken or metal objects are rough-cut and unedged; this is an artist who abhors the hem and the finish, which would weigh her fabrics and her sculptures heavily to the ground. Draped from the ceiling, pinned to the wall, weightless on a shelf, or hung in space, everything here was as if suspended - like a body floating in water, or a thought forever caught in midair. --Gilda Williams

SOUTH LONDON GALLERY

March 2–May 13

For the duration of this exhibition, the interior of South London Gallery will perform as the sculptor’s body double: Along various walls in this graceful, thirty-foot-tall prism, Alice Channer has designated clusters of objects as her own disembodied Eyes, Lungs, and Thighs (all works cited, 2012). These groupings are noted on a small plan displayed under the glass hood of a vitrine in the foyer, which also contains a pair of plasticized snakeskin tights (one leg drifting out of the archive to softly skim the floor) and texts including Simone Weil’s “Metaxu”: “Every separation is a link.” The key to Channer’s spare solo presentation lies in the collection of not entirely random accessories: sketches of YSL’s Le Smoking, a lone Virginia Slim, Xeroxes of the Erechtheion caryatids, plaster-cast bottles of Pantene Pro-V. Her savoir faire is in line with classical sculpture’s conditioning: beauty, decoration, ideal form.


Channer’s keen understanding of shape and proportion implies a particular aesthetic sensibility. She’s described the process of installing as an act of “dressing the gallery,” though her sculptures embody a subdued (postindustrial) physicality beyond mere ornament. Suspended from the ceiling, Cold Metal Body, Large Metal Body, and Warm Metal Body are warped images of the stone-carved draping that defines the skirts of the Three Nereids of fourth century BC Xanthos, enlarged and digitally printed onto reams of crepe de chine weighted down by marble prosthetic limbs. The effect is disorientation in three dimensions; heavy drapery floats on faux silk and dissolves into pixels at eye level. FreestandingReptiles and Amphibians, dramatically curved sections of mirror-polished stainless steel, expand along the floor––throwing convex reflections of the crown molding and creating their own sense of space via surface. Wide elastic bands in aquamarine and purple periodically embrace these arcs, which are reinforced by glittery aluminum casts of Topshop jersey separates. Channer’s work is structured and flexible, handmade and mass-produced, but always conceptually contiguous and purposely misleading.

— Kari Rittenbach