The October 2017 Kunstgarasjen exhibition clarified a number of concerns that I had about my work. Although I’d made what would prove to be a significant move from working solely with still, lens-based images to moving image work, I was still preoccupied with producing representations, which - while they were increasingly aesthetically and thematically practiced and refined - seemed to constitute repeated iterations of my “collecting” my experiences of certain sets of circumstances; creating images capable only of “pointing” at the objects of my curiosity, without being able to go beyond that collecting and pointing, in exploring the nature and the significance of the objects of my work.

 

Though my underlying concern at this time was already with the limitations of the lens-based image as a means of interrogating the objects of my research. I was however, still wedded to the idea of such images as a means of exploration and so my concerns were initially expressed through attempts to retain video images at the core of my practice, but to expanding their potential to interrogate the objects of my work, by changing their status within my practice and their relationship to the sites with which I was working; in the first instance, doing so by exploring their mode of display.

 

The Kunstgarasjen show had contained two video works, shown on wall-mounted, flat screen monitors in a “white-cube” space. This presentation of the video image understood as an autonomous art object and as the summative moment of a process of making, first separated from its referent by the act of image-making and then from the surroundings in which it was exhibited by a frame, exemplified my frustrations.

 

These concerns were uppermost in my mind when in January 2018, I spent a week working with and around the “new” KMD building; placing my existing (image based) work in different ways, into the building’s spaces. In so doing, I realise in retrospect, I was beginning to make tentative steps towards more radically re-forging the relationships between my work-making and its surroundings. In practice, at the time, my activity amounted to no more than staging various sited projections and naïve, improvised attempts to create relationships between images on a screen and objects in a physical space. I include documentation of these activities here, not on account of their merits as art-making, but as evidence, understood now as being significant in marking a shift in my thinking away from and beyond the frame of the image as the principal space in which I was interested and also beyond the act of creating representations as the principle vehicle for my making and my exploration of the sites which fascinate me.

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January 2018, Image and Situatedness

Contents

 

Journal Entry January 2018

 

Interrogating through practice the consequences of re-situating video in architectural space.

 

While experimenting with siting my work as a series of projections at locations around the KMD building, I realised that I was much more intrigued by the act of projecting the work into anonymous overlooked spaces such as stairwells where it might be "found" by a passer-by than by mounting formal cinema-like screenings in the gallery space. I was also really fascinated by the way in which the interior surface or "skin" of the building began to bleed through the projected images, becoming a part of the surfaces depicted in the image, as they became a part of the skin of the building (the surface-become-screen is the point at which the video image and space meet). What began to emerge in my mind was the idea that the video image-making I’ve been working with was perhaps less an end in itself and instead a material with which I could work to respond to a space or site: a part of the process of response, not in itself a self-contained end-point to that response.

 

This has set me thinking afresh about the role of the images within my work, which have been for a long time, framed and bounded objects and the end-points of my practice in themselves. In the light of my most recent experiments, screening videos of sites and events in the way I have been doing over the past few months, without consideration for the surroundings in which the images are shown, seems to create a somehow incomplete and unsatisfactory process compared to the potential offered by siting work. I'm now thinking about how I can develop the possibilities of video installation and the situated image’s power to reflect something of my response to either the space in which the video was created and/or my response to the space in which it's shown… or maybe even a way of responding to some other space, which is neither the one depicted in the video nor the space of the installation.

'naïve, improvised attempts to create relationships between images on a screen and objects in a physical space'

above and below: projections sited around the new KMD building, in January 2018

“the surface-become-screen is the point at which the video image and space meet”