Laurence Owen, 'Surfing the Hell Realm'
It may seem like a blissful day for surfing, but danger lurks below.
Surfing the Hell Realm is a series of heavily varnished polystyrene sculptures by Laurence Owen that take their formal lead from surfboards and similar aquatic leisure craft. Some of them also act as elaborate mounts for paintings by other artists, producing the unusual combination of innovative painting installation and watersports rental shop. But while it evokes some of the atmosphere, it fails to account for another important characteristic of surfing, and of life: the danger.
Surfing brings to mind ideas like communion with the sea, flow and connection with the natural world, and is also used to describe the way we navigate cyberspace. Combining AI-generated images with the boards’ futuristic forms, the sculptures put these associations into dialogue with each other, materialising the (somewhat dated) metaphor ‘to surf the web’ as if this activity were a human confrontation with a natural force like the sea. In so doing, the sculptures summon images of people sweeping across city skies on glossy, customised boards, literally surfing through a world in which digital and material realities have become indistinguishable.
The show’s accompanying zine elaborates on this idea, asking whether the ‘disorientation’ caused by digital technology is in fact a ‘harnessable and maybe comforting factor in our material evolutionary progression’ – like a wave that, given the right equipment, you can learn to ride. There is an understandable appeal to this imagery (see 500 Review on Elliot Fox for more surf art). But an attempt to describe our condition needs to acknowledge the possibility for disaster and misery to strike, to account for life’s frequent unsurfability. Missing that, the boards present a limited picture of reality, staying in the surf shop without venturing onto the choppy waves.
Laurence Owen and Kenneth Winterschladen, 39.6012 N, 9.0701 W (2023)
This is borne out in various ways. One sculpture, entitled 39.6012 N, 9.0701 W, includes a small painting of the Earth in space by Kenneth Winterschladen. The Earth is in a graph, miniaturising and containing otherwise vast spatial relationships. Strung along the elastics of the board are little figurines of fish and shells, like mementos from past trips, as if it has finished with its days at sea and retired to a life of contemplation. Unfortunately, even in the stillest of waters, we can’t be sure what cruel and arbitrary forces lurk below, to which even pro surfers fall prey. The show misses an important consideration, which, though statistically unlikely, still gives surfers pause for thought, a feeling of unease, even fear . . . shark attack!
Philosopher Amia Srinivasan puts it like this: ‘A lightning strike sounds better to me than a confrontation with a great white: up to six metres long and 1900 kilos of thrashing muscle, lunging at you more than 35 miles an hour, a gaping blood-stained maw revealing rows of huge, serrated teeth, perfectly adapted for tearing the meat off your bones while you’re still alive.’ You won’t see this in the show, but you can imagine it, can’t you? Tranquil blue skies, a light breeze, wrecked boards floating in a darkened sea. That’s what I’d call ‘Hell Realm’.
Surfing the Hell Realm runs at St Chad’s Projects, King’s Cross, from 16 April - 6 May 2023.
Quote is from Amia Srinivasan, ‘Sharky Waters’, London Review of Books Vol. 40 No. 19, 11 October 2018.