My recent show - Classified - at SIA Gallery in Sheffield, opening last Thursday.
Thanks for Sheffield Institute of Arts, all the participating artists, and those who came to show :)
The ubiquity of
information and data in our daily lives is pervasive, but we rarely question
its nature and origin. The messages presented to us, are they truthful? How are
they selected and classified? Who filters and controls them? And who has the
authority to decide which information is worth seeing or preserving it?
The exhibition includes
five UK-based artists, Estefani Bouza, Ting-Ting Cheng, David Penny, Marianna
and Daniel O'Reilly, using photography, video and installation to explore and
interpret the use of codified language in everyday life, challenging the
authorized subjects and the way they categorize messages. In the artworks, the
artists imitate the selecting, presenting and receiving process used by
museums, libraries and mass media to raise questions related with classified
information.
Estéfani Bouza's project Collection consists of fifteen photographs. Each of these
images depicts legumes, nuts or raisins, which are enumerated. In the first
picture of the project, one thousand and one items appear in the image, and in
each photograph of the series one more is added. Each element shown is
classified and ordered in reference to the recollection process used in the
land notebooks of the XIX century.
The different elements
are presented as catalogued specimens for analysis and observation in a way
that indicates their significance, but it is also through this mechanism of
representation that the ideology of the museums and the prerequisites of their
collections are exposed and questioned.
Ting-Ting Cheng's I judge a book by its cover explores the relationships between language,
identity and foreignness. In the project, She borrowed books of foreign
languages from a library, and photographed the side of them in piles. Apart
from the clue in the titles, the viewers cannot tell what language the books
belong to. Language, in our society, works as a selection mechanism. It selects
audience, deciding who would be able to read the books. By randomly choosing
books of the language the artist cannot understand, Cheng positioned herself as
a ‘cultural outsider’, that ‘she judged a book by its cover’, which signifying
the distance between different cultures and how nationality/identity influence
the way people judge others in our society.
David
Penny's The Ship and the Nose
was initiated through a residency at Manchester Central Library: the artist
was invited to make a piece of work as the huge collection of the libraries
archive was moved from its home to be temporarily re-housed in a local salt
mine. From looking for remnants of objects and scraps of paper in bins, amongst
dusty corners and under sets of shelves, things
are given a new narrative potential. The library contains knowledge that is
provisionally ordered and classified, waiting to be found again and processed
in a new context. The same approach has been taken with these lost objects,
they are found, re-ordered and grouped for display. Since working in the
library Penny has developed the work to incorporate new imagery, responding to
a sense of a narrative journey that the Ship
and the Nose has come to represent. There becomes scope for movement of the
imagination between the groupings of objects and images and an archive is
re-built, re-interpreted.
Marianna and Daniel O'Reilly's Longbridge is a mock-documentary video about
an incident which never happened. The artists used Google Earth to plan the
entire shoot of the video from their home in London. Locations were mapped-out,
and the set-pieces were planned. The artists also went to Copenhagen and
executed the shoot disguised as tourists with an entirely virtual,
minutely-planned itinerary. The subject of the film was drawn from Copenhagen’s
famous son Søren Kierkegaard, who wrote at length about the serious moral
implications of leading ‘the aesthetic life’. By throwing this criticism into
the entirely aesthetic experience of the tourist, the artists attempted to
flush out new experiences to be had from the old, treating cliché and truism as
fertile, rather than barren soil. To then round this experience off, the
O’Reilly's then posted images from the film back onto the locations on Google
Earth, disseminating covert experience through the channels of distribution.
http://www.shu.ac.uk/sia/gallery/events/event.html?id=81
