Joanne Tatham and Tom O'Sullivan live and work in Glasgow. They have been working together for fourteen years. Since 2005, their practice has become more and more complex, proceeding with a rigorous systematisation in the way they produce or collect objects.

Gathering wide-ranging types of objects, from monumental and small-scale sculptures, paintings, photographs, collages to ready-made or hand-crafted artefacts, Tatham and O'Sullivan have been progressively creating a set of objects and forms. From this, they decline and combine propositions taking the form of autonomous pieces displayed in collective shows, as well as whole exhibitions they curate with their own collection.

Thus, they are perpetually carrying and renewing objects, following a sort of open-ended variation made of recurrent forms and patterns. On the occasion of their solo show at La Salle de bains, they display a part of their pantheon or index of objects under the ambiguous and light-hearted title "You can take it as a thing or you can take it as a
thing".

Occupying La Salle de bains as a white-cube or any neutral location, the objects share the space without an obvious logical classification, excepted a deep sense of physicality, playing with their sculptural as well as architectural potential. The viewer is invited to wander in an environment quite similar to a stage set consisting of large-scale sculptures leant on their side or hung on the wall, an abstract painting, a small-scale sculpture made of a strange triangular bronze brush cup put on a plinth, a poster stuck on the wall, a found framed photograph of an unidentified object…

Following the rhetorical effect of the title within collapse any expectations, you can take it as a thing and consider only the forms: the formal aspects are charming and the situation tends to be attractive. It seems easy to penetrate Tatham and O'Sullivan's world. At first glance comes up the most popular, almost regressive signs that are the funny faces of

the sculptures. Leant on their side, as if they just fell on the floor, they lead us to literally ask what the meaning of the sculpture is.
The perplex expression of the sculptures faces parodies the theatricality of minimalist sculptures, as well as it refers to the visitor's position. The so-called decorative and enjoyable purpose barely resists the emergence of many basic questions whose answers are probably in the thing – may it be the universal history of forms, the post-modern history of sculpture, or the banal, but fundamental cultural fact experienced everyday with any objects.

And so does the work look more and more conceptual.Tatham and O'Sullivan's strategies are all about paths, displacements, and diversions synthesizing the concept of culture as a localized system of meanings and the world of art as “a commmunity sharing a collective mysticism” (1)  of forms, objects, and art history.

In some way, operating through various displays, declinations and combinations, the artists also play with their works, and integrate them to a performative cycle. The objects remain as the relics of an invisible performance which is the artistic creation process itself. The performance, partly immaterial, happens in the artists' studio, and from an exhibi-

tion space to another, thus simulating the life of the objects. In this way, things move in and out their artworks state. The situation, in which a folk oak chest (a new object the artists collected for the current exhibition) or a large-scale wedge has been placed, changes its social life. This defines its new status within its exchangeability or transformation for some other thing becomes its aesthetic and social relevant feature.

The rhetorical repetition of the exhibition title counterbalances its literal meaning and ingeniously echoes the theatrical and metaphorical effects of this objects gathering. The absurdity of the fake alternative, such as a joke without punch line, reveals the wittily distance set up by the artists, and as predictably intrigue.

(1)
 Lili Reynaud Dewar, 02, Winter 05-06