19 April - 16 May 2013

Furure Anterior: an installation of works by Hephzibah Rendle-Short

The title ‘future anterior’ is taken from Jacques Lacan’s definition of subjectivity: ‘What is realised in my history is neither the past definite as what was, since it is no more, nor even the perfect as what has been in what I am, but the future anterior as what I will have been, given what I am in the process of becoming.’

Hephzibah’s central interest is the triangular configuration made up of painter, object and painted mark, which she designates as an ‘observational apparatus’. She asks: can subjectivity be generated through this apparatus, and if so, how? Initially, she painted in the ‘life rooms’ at the Slade School of Art in the 1980s. She continued painting from observation until commencing a Fine Art PhD by project at the Royal College of Art in 2007, where her interest was drawn to a reciprocal subject-generating apparatus — the triangular configuration of analyst and speech within the psychoanalytic setting encapsulated by Lacan (‘I identify myself in language, but only by losing myself in it as an object’).

Taking the ‘diagrammatic space’ of Clare Hall — dining room, communal area, and gallery — as the starting point, future anterior introduces the additional dimension of temporality with the aid of stah-scopes. These objects are deployed to look back at old work — painted image. In doing so, something of the future is produced at the same time, documented for the exhibition in the form of digital image.