Land Of the Lost

25 October – 12 November 2004

Natasha Johns-Messenger
Martine Corompt

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Essay

Land of the Lost is a collaborative exhibition of the work of Natasha Johns-Messenger and Martine Corompt, artists who don't regularly work with prints, but who both choose to navigate the slippage where real space and fictitious or representational space come together.

With Martine's interest in stylised 'flattened' space of animation and anthropomorphic/caricature representation, we find a common ground with Natasha's interest in spatial paradox; a 'twist of representation'. With Martine, it is a phantasmagoric one, where impossible morphosis brings the tree-people to town, with Natasha, a closer look at the 'wonder' of the immediate gallery space.

In the 1979's TV show of the same name, the Land of the Lost was a temporal slip – a modern day family caught in prehistoric time, unable to return to 20th Century California. With Natasha Johns-Messenger's photographs it is scale – no other transformation or illusion has taken place. The fantastic landscapes depicted in the photographs is the landscape of the gallery, the abandoned dusty corners, or utility fixtures such as light switches, power points which are ordinarily rendered invisible by the visitor. An institutional space of people in transition. With Martine's Land of the Lost the slippage occurs thematically, between background foreground or landscape and subject, suggesting anthropomorphic tendencies of ridiculous degrees. Not quite uncanny or mysterious like the quasi-European forests of Disney – just regular tree people wandering in any city around the world.

Collectively, Land of the Lost, is a potentially familiar place, a ubiquitous 'here and now', not really lost in time, but more perhaps, lost in space. Space where the 'real' and the 'fictitious' slip into one another.

Martine & Natasha 2004

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Essay