7 March - 13 April 2014

Even the animal by its artful instincts sets itself apart, preserves itself; the human being in all conditions fortifies himself against nature in order to avoid its thousandfold evils and enjoy only the measure of goodness it accords; until he finally succeeds as far as possible in encasing the circle of all his genuine and acquired needs within a palace, in holding all the scattered beauty and happiness spellbound within its glass walls, where he then becomes softer and softer, substitutes joys of the soul for joys of the body, and his powers, with nothing disagreeable to tauten them to natural uses, melt away into virtue, beneficence, sensibility.

- Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Review of The Fine Arts in their Origin, their True Nature and Best Application, by J.G.Sulzer (1772), trans. Timothy J. Chamberlain, Eighteenth Century German Criticism (Continuum, 1992), p.177.

Enclosure speaks of containment and control. It is the physical or conceptual creation of a bounded territory or zone. Physical or pictorial acts of enclosure imply an extreme selectivity, where what is out of the frame is separated by a void space, implying a hermetically sealed microcosm free from outside influence or interference. Ideas of separation and entrapment are mirrored by fantasies of sanctuary and escape – the suspect enchantment of a snow-dome, the utopian dreams engendered by a map taken as reality, the encapsulation of a romantic ideal within the impenetrable bounds of a picture, a package, a glass box, a screen.

The artworks displayed within the house present various manifestations of this troubling dialectic through a confusion of historical and contemporary species of object, forms of vision technology, and genres of image making – between still-life and landscape, museum case and picturesque scene, marvellous proximity and alienated distance.