Gallery Review: NGCA- Fiona Crisp

I recently visited the NGCA to view Fiona Crisps's exhibition 'Material Sight. The exhibit itself featured a variety of larger scale photographs along with a few video works that show off 'The Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso', which is the world's largest underground laboratory that's used for particle physics.

The images themselves can initially feel a little confusing to understand due to the fact that the images have been taken out of context, so you could only understand the context of the work if you read the artist's statement. However, I find the work itself to be quite interesting because they allow you a window into a place that you otherwise wouldn't be able to see, opening up something that is traditionally very select and exclusive and bringing it into a wider audience.

One of the main things that I found to be interesting within the exhibition itself, was the way that the work had been presented within the gallery space. Instead of having the traditional white walls and mounting of a stereotypical white cube gallery, the walls are instead a steel like grey and the work is suspended through the use of steel beams and concrete columns. Some of the work has been made to face the opposite direction of the neighbouring works, almost forcing the viewer to walk around the entire structure of the exhibit in order to properly view it. By presenting the work in such a manner, the presentation of the work is almost like a sculpture itself, the photographs and video merely its surface on a steel skeleton.