REVIEW - David Lachapelle - 'Land Scape'

There’s something psychologically compelling about our perception of scale being manipulated, something innately alluring about seeing things reduced to their miniature representation. The sense perhaps of redefining the frustratingly rigid scale of our own physicality and the assertion of some semblance of superiority.

I remember my fascination and fondness for London stemming from a family holiday when I was 8 or 9. It was my first exposure to such a city, and the sheer enormity of it all left an indelible impression on me, like a geographic tinnitus that is still ringing on within me today.

Although more recently, as I’ve begun to think about these things, I do wonder whether it was the homeward-bound visit to Legoland, with its many colourful representations of London, that assisted in some way to distort or enliven my haptic sense of the amorphous city as a place of intrigue and imagination.

It is an inherent attraction that Swift captures so brilliantly in ‘Gulliver’s Travels’, and manifests itself in the preoccupations of model-making, toy train enthusiasts and other stereotypically ‘bloke-in-a-shed’ pursuits.

So, attending David Lachapelle’s ‘Land Scape’ exhibition at the Robilant + Veona gallery, I was impressed at how his work manages so successfully to dispossess you of your sense of scale, at least temporarily.

The exhibition presents his model representations of industrial power stations and oil refineries, placing them in naturalistic landscapes – deserts, city backdrops, and such like – and taking photographs that are then exploded into enormous prints. The effect is disorientating – the size of the prints appears to demand some distance of the observer, and yet it is only on drawing nearer that one realises that these steam-belching behemoths of industry are actually composites of everyday items arranged and built like some highly elaborate ‘Blue Peter’ model.

Intricate pipe runs are plastic straws, ventilation plant are old egg boxes, cooling chimneys are beers cans; the minutiae of the detail is persistently revealing, the ingenuity behind the constructions considerable. The success of the models lies in the implementation of such perfunctory items; the paraphernalia of the everyday – mobile phones, biro pens, matchsticks, cardboard – that we have come to regard on an almost subliminal level; their new application forces the observer to recognise them under a new guise.

It is a clever construct in repackaging a panoply of familiar products, camouflaged by their very ubiquity, to try and convince us of something altogether different – perhaps an allegory for the consumerist ‘confidence trick’ as a whole?

Indeed, the more I thought about it, the more I saw Lachapelle’s pieces as being – whether by design or otherwise – representative of the holistic process of production and consumption; the recycling of the end products of industry to assume the form of the mechanical apparatus, energy and power that generated them into existence in the first place.