‘Window Shopping’ extends Isabella Darcy’s ongoing project ‘Reworked’, which looks at clothing and collective behaviour in the twenty-first century. Darcy brings together photographs of strangers, flat block colour, layers of canvas board and the visual language of the shop window. The figures come from her personal archive of photographs taken in liminal spaces like airports, shopping centres and on public transport, spaces designed to move the body along by visual cues: signage, shopfronts and colour-coded routes. She is interested in what people wear and how they carry themselves and the small, shared habits that play out in these spaces.
The shop window gives the exhibition its title and its frame, a place where colour and design meet, and where people gather, pause and look. Darcy extends that frame to the other in-between places in her archive. She works in block-colour painting and screen printing. Screen printing began as a commercial process for signage, posters and advertising, so it arrives in the gallery already carrying the grammar of the shop window. Solid colour is felt before it is read, and reaches the body before it can be decoded as a sign or symbol. Darcy’s interest in colour is closer to architecture than painting. Colour acts on the body, but the body also activates the colour around it - the figure changes how colour is felt, and the colour alters how the figure is seen. Neither the figure nor colour can be called the background.
Rather than offering a picture of public space, ‘Window Shopping’ gives an account of how we are routed through it, and of how colour and design communicate meaning and desire along the way. In drawing attention to the shifting relationship between aesthetics and value, Darcy proposes that we move through public space guided by design certainly, but as much by feeling.