Rebecca Ackroyd | Shutter Speed Preview Musée d’art contemporain de Lyon, France

For her first solo exhibition in France, the Musée d’art contemporain de Lyon invites Rebecca Ackroyd to enter into a retrospective dialogue with her 2019 installation Singed Lids, which she created specifically for the 15th Lyon Biennale and which subsequently entered the macLYON collection. Made up of human limbs, fossilized objects, and plane wreckage cast in translucent epoxy resin, this work explores the notion of ruins, conjuring up a fragmented landscape seemingly consumed by an inner fire. Similar to fragile fireflies, these remnants of a past world share an uncertain future. In addition to this installation, Shutter Speed comprises a body of new works on paper depicting a series of eyes. Although Ackroyd is interested in the processes of decay inherent in objects and bodies, she does not use ruins as a sentimental representation of the past nor as merely residual traces of a drama; instead, she focuses on the precise moment when an event occurs and the way it fills the vision and subsequently permeates memory.

By titling the exhibition Shutter Speed, Rebecca Ackroyd not only refers to a fraction of time, but also to the photographic lens and the exposure time that enables light to capture an image. Here, she does not so much wish to imitate an actual camera as to evoke the rapid and fragile moment when light freezes reality. The scene that is presented in the middle of a specific but abstract space, suspended in its own decrepitude, can be seen as a metaphor for the human body as a whole, as is often the case in Rebecca Ackroyd’s work. The representation of the body is an essential focus of her practice, where it is never regarded as an external and impermeable volume. Her sculptures and drawings often present a form of openness, allowing the gaze to penetrate matter, flesh, organs, and muscles, like an open and fragile architecture. If the skeleton, a vertically articulated frame, sometimes evokes the structure of a building, the skin is linked to the envelope. It protects what is inside, while its porosity allows for respiration. In the same way, Rebecca Ackroyd’s work often acts as a visual transposition of this metaphorical connection between architecture and the fragility of the human body. The translucent structure at the center of the exhibition scenography resembles a thin membrane preserving a perishable architecture, while some twelve pairs of eyes observe the scene. Rebecca Ackroyd’s works on paper, including recent pastels, focus primarily on the body, powerful, alive, and vibrant, but also impaired and weakened by the passage of time and aging, as well as the very nature of organic composition subjected to dehydration—when it is not exposed to certain instruments intended to transform it, like eyelash curlers, or strange barriers sometimes protecting, sometimes threatening.

These eyes seem to observe the spectator as much as the scene, and embody, in passing, several temporalities and attitudes towards the event. Therefore, Shutter Speed refers to the eyelid which, akin to a shutter curtain, must find a balance between reality and the sensitive surface, which protects but also separates. If the dismembered plane inevitably alerts us to the fragility of all things, both organic and technological, it ultimately conveys a superimposition of images and realities, a fragmentary and partial perception of the world. As indicated by its title, Singed Lids recalls the retinal burn which occurs when a reality lost in the darkness strikes our ocular membrane for the duration of a flash of light. An image reduced to an abstract silhouette is then imprinted, creating a ghostlike form floats in our field of vision. Did we dream it? What reality did we perceive? Is the object still there? Rebecca Ackroyd’s images taken from personal and collective memory combine body fragments, gestures, presences, as well as disappearances and absences, thereby restoring a new reality of the world that is partial, fragile, uncertain but very much present.

Rebecca Ackroyd’s (b. 1987 in Cheltenham, UK) lives and works between London and Berlin. She received her Post Graduate Diploma in Fine Art from the Royal Academy of Arts, London, in 2015 and her BA from Byam Shaw School of Art, London, in 2010. Ackroyd’s practice assembles painting and sculptural works into dream-like landscapes, often populated by ambiguously gendered figures in varying states of repose. Ackroyd’s work builds on a practice of constructing and examining space in order to pose themes of displacement and the interrogation of what may belong where. Her work stages encounters with ubiquitous, innocuous objects that are steeped with a sense of the uncanny, in order to excavate our cultural memory and explore how meaning is made. Recent solo exhibitions include Peres Projects, Seoul (2022), Peres Projects, Berlin (2021 and 2018), Fondazione Pomodoro, Milan, curated by Cloé Perrone (2019), and the Zabludowicz Collection, London, curated by Paul Luckraft (2017). Her work has been part of numerous group exhibitions, including CAPC musée d’art contemporain, Bordeaux (2023), Aïshti Foundaton, Beirut, curated by Massimiliano Gioni (2022), Rugby Art Gallery and Museum, Rugby, curated by Sarah Holdaway (2022), Städtische Galerie Wolfsburg, Germany, curated by Michael Müller (2021), and  the Centre Régional d’Art Contemporain Occitanie, Sète, curated by Tara Londi (2018). Ackroyd was part of the 15th Lyon Biennale, curated by the Palais de Tokyo. This fall, she has upcoming institutional solo exhibitions at the Kestner Gesellschaft, Hanover and the Musée d’art contemporain de Lyon, France. Additionally, she will participate in a group exhibition at Warwick Arts Centre, Coventry, opening this October.