1) Simon Denny
"He [Denny] arranged television stands, shelving units and giant televisions into six blocks, one after the other, each with its screen facing the back of the set in front of it. The various models – from one 50 centimetres deep to the smaller monitors stacked precisely on top of one another – played different footage: images from sales displays, relaxation videos, brightly coloured underwater footage of shoals of fish and coral reefs. Because the monitors stood so close together, the result was less a many-windowed architecture (as in the work of Nam June Paik, for example) than a kind of reef that could be walked around like tanks at an aquarium. Disconcertingly, the posters assigned to each device described not the flora and fauna of the submarine worlds in the films, but the technical specifications of the equipment on which they are presented." ------ Here I am interested in Denny's installation methods and components he uses to highlight certain aspects within the work. How he brings the actual technical equipment he uses to show the videos as equally important bodies in the space as the videos. Also the combination of text via posters and digital works is relevant in terms of my own install and how I use different components in the space in relation to each other, to create an open dialogue with the works. I am interested in how the content of the videos can differ from the physical works in the space and form interesting and relevant juxtapositions in the space.
"At the same time, the installations remain boxes filled with strange stuff, recalling the works of Joseph Cornell and George Brecht. ‘Deep Sea Vaudeo’ was also recorded on video: a well-known German television actress, Theresa Underberg, announced the exhibition by reading the text from the gallery information sheet written by Denny himself, while in the recording studio she was surrounded by the television sculptures, as if she were a presenter on a teleshopping programme. This brings us full-circle, but instead of a closed loop, the circle in question never quite settles: nature and media, signified and signifier, depiction and representation all swirl together in an indissoluble spiral. What looks almost banal or cobbled together, is a multi-layered farewell to the triangular relationship between performance, sculpture and media art – a relationship now overtaken by flat screens, computer monitors and online personas." Talking about multiple ways of communicating a set of ideas through different layers of broadcasting. Having more aspects that transmit different aspects of its ideas fleshes out the work as well as adds different meanings and further connotations to other things. Placing it in a context of 'television broadcasting' with a presenter. Comparing the work to things in the world, casting themes upon it to bring issues into conversation. Almost like putting on a show for an audience - something that compels you enough to be interested to unpack further ideas in the work.
Text and images accessed: https://www.frieze.com/article/simon-denny
2) Allan Sekula - Fish Story
"Completed between 1989 and 1995, Fish Story saw Allan Sekula’s career-long pursuit of a contemporary ‘critical realism’ reach its most complex articulation. Fish Story reconstructed a realist model of photographic representation, while taking a critical stance towards traditional documentary photography. It also marked Sekula’s first sustained exploration of the ocean as a key space of globalisation. A key issue in Fish Story is the connection between containerized cargo movement and the growing internationalization of the world industrial economy, with its effects on the actual social space of ports.
The ambition of Fish Story lies both in its immense complexity and global scope and in its emphatic challenge to the dominant climate of postmodern theory and practice of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Fish Story occupies a pivotal place in a gradual shift, still nascent in the early 1990s, from a widespread culture of resignation and cynicism to one of renewed radical engagement in the art world."
I am interested in how this takes the form of being a very research-driven project with scientific tones but also challenging modern standards of how spaces in the ocean and sea-based travel is observed. Sekula explores the ocean as an important space that has this vast, busy history of travel, commercialisation and also a kind of a forgotten realm. She explores this particular space that is almost seen as another world operating in the background of culture. Ideas of journey, duration, project around prominent issues of political and environmental impacts as well as bringing these ideas into an art context. Turns into a narrative of images that discuss a multitude of issues from a certain, documentary-like but almost a 'lived' perspective.
Text and images accessed: https://mackbooks.co.uk/products/fish-story-br-allan-sekula
3) Fiona Connor
"Fiona Connor’s installations typically present collections of objects or structures that have been derived, at one-to-one scale, from pre-existing architectural systems. Recent projects have documented vernacular structures from outside the gallery, while others have explored the architecture and display mechanisms of the museum itself. Within a sustained dialogue between location and representation, Connor’s work explores how specific environments condition our perception of objects."
I find this helpful with my found objects that I source from the outdoors. How they change value or ideas when repositioned within an exhibition space. Connor's method is quite simple as the outdoor object's position is mimicked in the gallery space. Here it provides a new set of ideas and envisions connotations in relation to other artworks in the space.
Familiar, almost nostalgic signs placed in the gallery. I like how it starts referring to places outside the gallery and forms relationships with specific sites in the terrain. Feels absurd yet leads viewers to imagine scenarios that could form interesting connections to the object, its role in the world vs its role in the gallery space. What does it do as an active statement, or an object that has been relocated to be looked at in relation to a set of concepts?
Image accessed: https://www.1301pe.com/fiona-connor-1
Text accessed: https://www.scapepublicart.org.nz/scape-7-common-co-op-coop
Images accessed: https://chartwell.org.nz/seeing/collection/documentation-of-object-no-5-mount-gabriel-ruby-and-ash-to-beach-sign/