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This
is part of a series of works which were based on photographs I'd collected
whilst travelling between Scotland, Germany, Hungary and Romania. In this
case I worked with a photograph of a silver cloud like shape used in a
shop window display and a landscape wall poster penetrated by a ventilation
pipe, found in a bar in Cluj, Romania. The cloud like shape was
cut into a sheet of hardboard on which was pasted a
piece of a landscape wall poster bought in Leipzig, Germany. A
similar shape was attached to the wall in silver behind the cut out. A
neon light was placed between hardboard and wall. Having
spent the last four to five years living between Glasgow, Budapest and
Leipzig, my own relocation is reflected in the displacement of images
in my work. In this exhibition I have exhibited some of my collection
of snapshot photographs taken in Scotland, Germany, Hungary and Romania
('I
Couldn't Control My Indifference'). These photographs document
a mix of found constructions that, made by a non-artist and presented
in the home or shop window as decoration, fall outside of the borders
of what is normally considered fine art. As part of the process of working
with this collection of images, I have remade some of the objects documented
in the photographs, so as they can physically exist in a new environment.
This in part expresses something of an obsessiveness and a willful stupidity
but perhaps it is also a means of coping with the dislocation of leaving
one place and being in another. I have been making these remade 'found
images' for about two years now and until now, they usually have some
common features. Often,
as in the ceiling and shelf pieces, ('Movement
Detectors Are In Operation In This Building' a reproduction
of a suspended ceiling from the foyer of a university building in Glasgow,
and 'Free
From Hope', a reconstruction of a display shelf from the
shop window of an empty shop in Budapest), the source images contain a
simple geometric abstraction, an aesthetic sensibility similar to Modernist
art from the sixties and seventies in which the artist's work sought an
existence free from any reference to the real world outside the walls
of the gallery. Working in the opposite direction, i.e. using a photograph,
taken in a specific place at a specific time as the source image from
which to fabricate the artwork these become flawed Modernist works whose
utopian aspirations are linked to a particular social situation rather
than an abstract artistic transcendence of reality. It is a reality that
is linked to a period (or place) when (or where) a utopian social project
has failed. In the case of Movement
Detectors Are In Operation In This Building', although
at first glance similar in appearance, it lacks the factory made refined,
clean finish of a Donald Judd or Dan Flavin and displays rather a slightly
botched in places, hand-crafted imitation of the perfection and neutrality
to which the Modernist project aspired. Further, with the photograph nearby
as reference it is revealed to be locked into a real (although displaced)
existence. Other
more recent photographs in this show whilst still maintaining an interest
in DIY constructions, depart from this theme and look at the results of
attempts to borrow from images of wild nature in constructing a self identity.
The discrepancy between the kitschy artifice of the represented object
contained as poster or tattoo image, skinned or stuffed wall decoration,
neon light outline or caged zoo exhibit, and its natural living origin
highlights how through inadequate representational means, a well intentioned
admiration of nature can end up reflecting a pathetic failure to respect
and appreciate it. Some
objects in the show such as the 'Untitled
- Adler', a paper mache eagle, flying high in the space
are reproductions of a found photographed image but again, isolated from
context until seen in connection with the photograph. The work, 'It
Doesn't Matter' borrows from a mix of sources to collage
together a silver cloud-like shop window display object image, photographed
in Romania, and a found mountain landscape wall poster image. It is mounted
on hardboard and fixed so that it stands 20cm out from the wall with a
neon strip light behind it. The outline shape of a bear skin in the wall
piece, 'Because
I Say So' is taken from a children’s 'cut out and
fold it' kit for making paper animals. Due to the 2-dimensional layout
of the 3-dimensional object with all its folding tabs, the shape of the
animal skin is quite abstract and almost totally unrecognizable as a bear.
It is made of artificial fur with a green felt decorative surround based
on the one around the real skin in the photograph. There is a decorative
glass light fixture on the wall next to it. All
the objects were located in the larger first room of the gallery, heterogeneous
and isolated from context, with the collection of photographs in the smaller
second room, ensuring that a connection could only be made by memory i.e.
without a direct visual reference.
Shown together, these displaced objects exhibit an incompatibility
with the homogenized slick of economic globalisation and provoke both
cause for celebration and concern. |