WHERE
By Sneh Mehta and Keti Japaridze
Imagine being a part of the artwork… a call to experience artwork from within.
Renate Moritz and Everton Wright, invited volunteers to participate in being the drawing by walking the lines that they had created on the beach at Camber Sands in East Sussex, England. The process was filmed from a crane with the camera looking down from high above and consequently the documented happening intermingled with the sound of the sea and the surrounding colours. Their intention was to transform their artefact into a series of pathways, which become a never-ending walk, a walk that was unresolved.
WHERE is the title of the show by six-of-one, a London based group of artists, who are interested in investigating the idea of place and location, within the paradigm of space and time through personal, interpersonal and reciprocal geographies using digital and material media.
WHERE, extracted from its usual function, appears as a site of departure indicating a human strand in the world of perceptual virtualities. It is a question explored through territorial, social, existential attachments, creating a dialectic between subjectivity and objectivity; it is about spatial arrangements in the external world and about a disoriented embodied presence within it.
Alison Bickmore’s film examines ‘escapism’ and ‘fantasy’. It features interviews with people who have made parallel lives in the midst of nature. They are a community who live by their own rules in relation to their constructed habitats, which are in physical and geographical proximity to the sea.
Julie Hoyle explores how information technology affects us. Her work manifests virtual time/space in our real time/space simultaneously. In consequence transforming the boundaries of traditional dualisms, such as man/machine, mind/body, real/virtual. The artefact takes form, as a series of light box installations, which interrupt and reconfigure the surrounding space.
Penny Hambling and Julia Dennis’s approach is specifically through the context of memory. Penny’s work is informed by voluntary and involuntary memories, which traverse a fine line between the real and fictional. She transforms traces from her personal history into abstract photomontages that are not easily decipherable.
Julia Dennis’s installations interplay between functional, fictional and imaginative forces. Smells, touch and taste are of equal importance as sight within her bizarre constructions, which aim to dislocate our individual perceptions.
Finally, Bea Deaton’s stones are a physical presence of the absence of contemporary belief in God and eternity. Her work is conceived through personal loss and trauma, which searches for a place for life and eternity after death.
WHERE emerged for its creators as a site of ontological departure in relation to their engagement with the artwork. It unfolded as a ubiquitous interface between a reality that included the mundane space of the everyday and the space of hyper-reality where identities are dissolved. WHERE, in the context of location and subjectivity, blurs within the matrix of continuous and never-ending encounters.
WHERE
Curated by Sneh Mehta and Keti Japaridze.
28 September- 9 October 2004
Six-of-one,
The Menier Gallery, 51/53 Southwark Street
London SE1 1TE
