Will Handley is an avowed iconoclast. He is the archetypal “anti-artist” who likes to make a mess of things. His practice involves taking things (and ideas) apart, demolishing conventions and expectations, while saving the pieces and refashioning them to different but more relevant ends.
In re:vision Handley transforms the gallery into his studio in all its disarray, seeking to challenge a presumption that galleries are pretentious strongholds of the intellectual elite. The walls have been colonised with blue paint, and the floor is littered with unfinished works, works in progress and the detritus of a collector of ideas.
Much of the imagery which constitutes the work in re:vision has obvious links to Handley’s previous series, however, after working with artist friends in Berlin for three months, and making art for the sheer social and aesthetic pleasure of it, the concepts of planning, continuity and commercial success, seemed increasingly antithetical to him. Handley has never been concerned with success and sell out shows, rather he is motivated by the creative drive and the enjoyment of working and making art intuitively: making art that, at an obvious level, “makes itself felt”.
In every sense of the word, re:vision is a group of works whose individuality is realised in their sense of detachment from one another - each work is very different and their relationship to the group dynamic. The series operates in the way good friends might debate an issue, testing and challenging each other while remaining firm and cohesive in their familiarity.
Throughout all works there is a strong aesthetic quality, deriving from the strength of Handley’s personal language and ideas. Works suggest a spiritual realm which is found less in the ideologies of conventional religions and institutions, and more in the ideas and ephemera which make up our daily lives. A recurring theme is the use of blue in the works, referring to blue-screen – the film-making version of emptiness. This jarringly artificial colour floats in limbo between foreground and background, void and object creating a visual ambiguity that toys with viewer perceptions.
Handley works intuitively with ideas, materials and processes and the pull for him lies in his ability to transform them. Many of the works are comprised of materials that interest him as “things” in which he perceives an innate potential. Handley gently brings the individual elements together under a process of change; the resulting sum of associations the works radiate is impossible to stem. In many respects Handley has collected universal concepts like history, learning, knowledge, communication, philosophy, cultural diversity and nature, for example, and reduced them to present a personal view of the world. While all concepts are loaded with cultural associations, the works in re:vision by their composite nature, elude specific meaning.
Handley’s approach of accretion in his making means that even ideas which are apparently simple have the capacity to reach out in every direction, revealing more and more associations. The beauty for us as viewers lies in being privy to a personal vision the nature of which is obscure, and yet we stand on the edge of it, wondering and smiling to ourselves at the experience of it.
- Kim Atherfold
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