THE PAGE - Enclosures, Canal, London.

Blondin’s Apparatus, Niagara in the Mist 2014, is a kinetic assemblage of furniture, cables, cameras and screens by Alex Pearl. There’s a sense of the closeted, eccentric inventor in the domestic attributes of his sculptural elements, the drawing in and transformation of ignoble objects, which sees a wine box transformed into a mobile plinth for a projector which, with the rhythm of a docile windscreen-wiper, sends the vertiginous image of a tightrope walker swaying back and forth on the gallery wall. The motion seems to vibrate through the grainy, worn out image of Blondin, antagonizing his stability and our trepidation as with a barely visible motion he edges across a rope over the Niagara Falls. There’s an interesting contrast between the epic grandeur of Blondin’s gesture, and the domestic apparatus with which Pearl contrives to deliver the scene. The keyhole, spherical form of the projection elevates the distinction, and hints at the vicarious voyeurism attached to domestic life, where acts of daring are spied on through the television, newspaper, or computer screen, a glass of wine in hand. A second screen in Pearl’s piece shows what at a glance seems to be an abstracted, paired down static, until you connect the grainy strand to the thin length of thread taped between the side of the monitor and the adjacent wall. A small camera peers down the length of the thread, which is transformed with surprising credibility into a rope across a vast clouded chasm, a simulated void. Dropping in then out of focus, the thread easily alludes to being Blondin’s heavily concentrated next step.  On the lower shelf of the plinth that the monitor sits on is the remainder of the Peri-Lustra darning thread used for the illusory tightrope. Its humble, worn scale humorously sews the seeds of the daring and perilous into the everyday and domestic. The interplay between darning and tightrope walking, between the void and the hole in a sock suffuses the piece with a layered playfulness.