Alegría Repila Smith’s ‘Surface Tension’ at Leeds Art Gallery – Review

Alegría Repila Smith’s ‘Surface Tension’ at Leeds Art Gallery. Image Credit: James Clarkson.

Back in November, I reviewed Ann Hamilton’s ‘We Will Sing’. In the accompanying interview, I spoke at one point of “love and memory”, to which she responded that “love and memory is all we really have”. These words have become a guiding hand to me as I have navigated art since. Ann is a veteran of the art world, but if you think that a young artist at the other end of the career path would lack the depth to navigate love and memory in their work, Alegría Repila Smith is here to show you are wrong.

Indeed, there are important parallels in the two exhibitions. Hamilton’s was of a much larger scale and occupied the entire roofspace of Salt’s Mill for several months, whereas ‘Surface Tension’ was a pop-up which occupied the single Centre Court space at Leeds Art Gallery for a mere weekend.

‘Surface Tension’ is anchored by a dozen oil-drums, each with a fishing-rod aerial which in turn hold up a dredging net – symbolic enough in itself, but also it formed the shape of a canal boat – and this net is made to appear to have dredged up a multitude of symbolic items from the canal. These items include things that Alegría really did exhume from the murky depths: rusty beer-cans, a small globe, cutlery, driftwood, algae-caked rope, old socks, a bear-trap and perhaps most impressively, a rusting drop-handle-barred racing-bike with a wheel missing. Added to these were things she had scored from various sources: the aforementioned fishing-rods from a gripe of middle-aged blokes on the internet, ballet-shoes from the Northern Ballet School (I learn that after one performance, the “surface tension” of these shoes often breaks down so they become quickly useless), a pair of old wet-suits (one of which appears to be trying to clamber out of the water, while the other is falling backwards in an apparent filmic slo-mo), and fine white netting which cuts against the main black mesh and resembles rigging or hammocks depending on the drape.

Alegría Repila Smith’s ‘Surface Tension’ at Leeds Art Gallery. Image Credit: James Clarkson.

It is useful to know that Alegría not only uses Trickster techniques, but inhabits a Trickster persona in her creative life and even beyond, which informed the mixed sourcing. “Trickster is the role that I inhabit as an artist and it enables me to do a couple of things ‘ordinary’ folks can’t,” she says. “Trickster is able to cross boundaries and muddle polar opposites: truth/lies, the sacred/the profane, ignorance/wisdom, so on. As Trickster I give myself permission to do the same – some of the pieces in the installation were not actually from the canal, but were carefully forged artefacts slotted in between authentic finds. But in this way, the effect I hope it brings is a muddying of boundaries and definitions which humans have invented, and which now govern our understanding of all that we experience.”

Each item’s symbolism is open to interpretation, but the viewer always feels led by the artist whatever that interpretation is. I felt that the bear-trap, its teeth pulled wide-open, resembled a crown and was a stand-in for Empire, and that the wetsuits were the various fates of those engaged in that Empire’s work – the survivors and the doomed, mostly – while the shoes evoked the precariousness of life and work on a bustling stench of a canal. Like ‘We Will Sing’, ghosts sang to us and, also like ‘We Will Sing’, this was not just created in our eyes but also in our ears. ‘Surface Tension’ is accompanied by a patchwork soundscape of field recordings, free-divers’ soundtracks, underwater audio and – in a spooky echo of Emily Eaghan’s voicework for Ann Hamilton at Salts Mill – some ancient recordings of Irish women keening, which leads me to ask about the importance of Death, and it turns out Trickster plays a part here too.

Alegría Repila Smith’s ‘Surface Tension’ at Leeds Art Gallery. Image Credit: James Clarkson.

“I make use of one of the classic roles Trickster has occupied in mythology – they are always the ones with the ability to travel between the lands of the dead and living. It’s kind of how I justify the claim that I can do exactly this in my work, and this is the central myth of my art practice.”

While many objects and sounds hang in front of and around us, some are on the floor of the exhibit. Driftwood grounds the whole thing for me, because unlike driftwood on a beach, which goes in and out of the water, experiencing new things (while also wearing away to nothing, like a life), the driftwood in a canal gets trapped in stagnant slime and this gives the piece a skilful sense of doom. Also grounded is most of the rope, which acts – for me – as a border, and speaks to the themes I explore in much of my poetry. The idea of who “belongs” where, who looks out of place or is excessively “seen”. The rope also represents restriction, and threat. Additionally, Alegría drops in that the idea of bondage was not far from her mind – the sexual type, yes, but also in its meaning as enslavement and entrapment.

Alegría Repila Smith’s ‘Surface Tension’ at Leeds Art Gallery. Image Credit: James Clarkson.

Of course, canals and their tow-paths are borders in themselves as much as they are thoroughfares.
Our rivers and ancient tracks emerged naturally, or were formed from common movement. By contrast, our canals and railways (some of which were built into old canal-beds) were developed by the Empire, mostly as tools for the extraction of wealth by the powerful at the expense of the poor. This included the labour of overworked slum residents in towns and cities, as well as chattel slavery in the colonies. While Alegría does not hesitate to tackle these huge structural issues, she does so with a light touch. The anger generated by the piece infuses, rather than explodes, within one, and leaves room too for grief: the sense of loss of ways of life, of noise, of industry, of communities, of stories and of love. Love and memory.

***

To keep up to date with Alegría’s latest work you can follow her on instagram and for more information on Leeds Art Galleries pop-up and temporary exhibitions you can visit their website.