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JOHNNIE DADY : Uncertain Objects

Occupying a space somewhere between napkin doodle and workshop prototype, Johnnie Dady’s most recent body of work reflects the artist’s penchant for holding objects and ideas in perpetually propositional states. In their nascent and seemingly indeterminate forms, Dady’s sculptures offer us a glimpse at fleeting moments of human thought. In these moments, new and nebulous ideas rise to the surface of the conscious mind and begin to take form. Dady’s work seems to seize on these inklings, notions and schemes in their early stages, before they form themselves into predictable patterns or known outcomes. Like a cartoon character pulling out a pencil, drawing a door and walking through it, the artist conjures scenarios that are not quite pure idea, not quite physical fact; squint hard and you’ll see the thought bubble around these things. In this intermediate state, variously described by the artist as ‘provisional’, ‘propositional’ or ‘notational’, Dady’s thought objects gracefully navigate the treacherous gulf between conception and execution.

The appeal of the propositional state is manifold, but so too are its pitfalls. On one hand it allows the artist to be constantly engaged with one of the most exciting phases of the making process, wherein the work is more open and more charged with possibility. If the making process were to be likened to a typical narrative arc, Dady’s work drops us in during the tough second act, where both conflict and excitement reign. On the other hand, Dady’s proclivity for ‘unfinished’ forms could be misconstrued as a kind of cop out – an unwillingness or inability to conclude the work. This is patently not the case. These objects are hard fought for, heavily worked and delicately calibrated to walk that fine line between states. While words such as ‘proposition’, ‘uncertain’ and ‘unknown’ pepper the artist’s writing, speech and even titles, there is nothing tentative about his work; rather, he pursues his idiosyncratic vision with increasing deliberateness, confidence and daring.

In broad strokes (and at the risk of sounding glib), Dady’s practice might be summarised as a human being making stuff about human beings making stuff. In thinking about thinking and making things about making things, one risks creating work that is a kind of closed circuit or self-devouring Ouroboros. Again, Dady successfully circumvents this potential hazard with works that are refreshingly free from insularity, solipsism or excessive navel-gazing. Indeed, with their bawdy humour, seductive materiality and playful allusions to familiar objects, this body of work is one of Dady’s most accessible.

In many of Dady’s previous investigations into the provisional object he has employed more readily identifiable languages of proposition and planning – the urgent scrawl of a sketchbook notation, the mutable digital space of an architectural CAD drawing or the expediency of a designer’s maquette. With Uncertain Objects, the artist synthesises a distinct material vocabulary consisting of suitably blank materials and the occasional found object. While all operating under the auspices of this cohesive material language, each work takes a subtly different approach in addressing the notion of the propositional object, variously employing strategies of intervention, augmentation, hybridisation and the anthropomorphising of objects. Rough trade, for instance, engages a kind of anthropomorphism often associated with Disney films, although this association is immediately undercut by the fact that the chairs would appear to be mid-coitus. In anticipation of a signature touch (light applause only) collides step-ladder and sweeping, 'Gone with the wind' staircase, but in the process of this collision becomes much more than sum of its parts. The companion piece to this work, a digital print on drafting film, cheekily borrows the weight and authority of architectural plan printing processes in inflating a notebook doodle to life-size. Suggestions of functionality or the utilitarian are offered then immediately withdrawn. In Barrow and Tape work, Dady indicates that he is not above making visual (and even literary) puns. The most recent and most inexplicable work is Provisional vehicle for walking on water. Despite its uncharacteristically prescriptive title, this piece refuses to commit itself fully to any known order of object, seeming to be equal parts vehicle, furniture and biomorphic entity. While the most labour intensive it is also the most ambiguous and fluid, perhaps getting closest to the “solidification of thinking things through” that Dady is so doggedly pursuing

Roy Ananda