house of spouse, Vienna
Miriam Stoney
For her solo presentation with Viennese gallery house of spouse, Miriam Stoney presents a multi-media installation of new works connecting her ongoing interest in language learning, spatial metaphors, consciousness and memory. Adopting and adapting the mnemonic device of the memory palace – a method of using visualisations of familiar spatial environments to enhance the recall of information – Stoney creates a series of wall-hangings and fixtures that give material form to the verb-conjugation and declension tables of her childhood French lessons.
Through the layering and superimposition of a systematized grammar onto domestic objects, these wall works figure the infiltration of language into everyday life as both a structural organization of experience and a perversion of perception. These wall works are complemented by a sculptural/textual installation, which seeks to actively position and move the viewer within the space to engage with the poetic texts within it. Based on architectural models and their manipulation of scale for human comprehension, the installation engages the multivalence of “grasping” as both a physical gesture of seizing, taking or holding, as well as a moment of understanding. The presentation as a whole seeks to demonstrate the ways in which we live by language, we are constituted by and moved by language, and that a truly reciprocal sign relation depends on conceding some agency to the structures that house us.
