Reviews & Exhibition Texts | Charlotte Norwood

In a short scene in Nabokov’s novel Ada, the protagonist, Van, visits the copy shop of Mrs Tapirov: people bring her objets d’art and furniture of which she produces faithful reproductions. Van has brought something for Mrs Tapirov to copy; significantly, he doesn’t remember, as he recounts the story years later, what the object was.

Preoccupied chewing on syntax, the hovering pages document on the screen of a laptop conceals the majority of an image displayed in a previously opened chrome window.

The image is of a photograph, a dark interior of some kind, etched and embossed, sunken into a thick frame of fibre like material that appears a yellowish beige in comparison to the sheet of MDF it lies across and the white glare of the document that cuts the image in two.

The bottom edge of frayed pulp scuffed intermittently in slight upward curls creeps away from its form as a frame, yet obstructed by its digital rendition of a photograph, the material is trapped in the screen of the laptop, whose hardware sits amongst folds of a cream fabric, that once hung vertically from a fixed track attached to the top of a window recess.

It’s here that Nabokov deliberately elides or leaves blank the spot, actual or conceptual, in which the original should stand.

On closer inspection, the fabric encompasses a pixelated aesthetic, hazily striped in purple neon. When attached to the fixed track, these stripes symmetrically correspond to the white slats of a neighbouring radiator to the left of the window. However, they are barely visible from this position, partially obscured by a series of uniformed plastic arcs. Plastic. Static, is like the noise of thinking, a sound that mimics the shuttering of arcs, that in a clean swipe from 13.30 to 23.30 on a clock face, eclipses the fabric entirely.

As Van waits to collect his goods, he idly strokes the flowers sitting in a vase, deep red, variations of grey and cerulean blue, – imitation ones, like everything else in the shop – and suddenly finds himself ‘cheated of the sterile texture his fingertips had expected when cool life kissed them with pouting lips. “My daughter,” said Mrs Tapirov, who saw his surprise, “always puts a bunch of real ones among the fake pour attraper le client. You drew the joker.”’ The making of in-carnations…

Positioned behind the photograph of the framed etching and sheet of MDF, the laptop and fabric, is a chair. Slanted to the right due to an uneven levelling of the ground, the chair is taupe in colour and chameleon by tone, a corner of the base of its back left leg grazes the dust of the mottled duck floorboard below. A scuffed piece of brown paper marked by a black tar like substance, a footprint maybe, is wedged between the gap once visible between the floorboard and base of the adjacent left leg.

In front of the chair leans a large pane of glass, its calculated tilt forms a right angled triangle with the wall behind the chair and the floorboard. On the right side of the glass runs a yellow block of pastel, akin to the colour of torn strips of masking tape, which binds wads of bubble wrap encasing a painting that’s reflected in the glass and obscuring the chair. The painting rests at a similar angle between the floorboard and a different wall of which hangs an image of hands - female made and time worn.

Regressively, allegorical, it matters, perhaps, that the term mimesis has an ancient connection to a type of flower (the mimosa’s contortions when touched were said in the time of Aristotle to mimic the grimaces of mime): Mrs Tapirov’s artificial bloom-bunches not only imitate real ones but also stand for imitation itself, for all artifice.

The window which once held the fixed track and fabric, now reveals an image of a figure, familiar, glimpsed through a negative void of blue. Drawn in thick condensation coating its interior, a triptych produces a shape of a space where production fits in. Rotating in the pocket, a globe like continent marked stone of burnt amber and grey, the figure peers down in a pool. Oil. The reflection of light on the residue of the window prevents the sighting of the face mirrored in liquid, which shatters and dissipates catching sight by the eye with a hurl of the stone.

If post modernism has nothing to do with periods or time, it is simply an attitude of incredulity towards grand narratives. Which to ascribe by extension to the novel, and perhaps to all Nabokov’s work, the status of Mrs Tapirov’s shop: an emporium of simulations in which the real remains hidden by being disguised as the copy of what it actually is.