About a week or so ago , I was browsing in a little book shop , specifically looking at a book on japanese patterns when just as i lifted the book into my hands, guess what guys ..... out popped a mouse from under the book shelves , and scuttered across the floorboards to the other side. Amazing !
Anyway, I have been enjoying this theme of ours very much and I think the team seems to be working and weaving itself together quite well.
I like the way things can spontaneously start growing and im a strong believer in happy accidents.
The fact that the sentence we chose collectively " ....out popped a mouse!" originally came from one of Aesop's short stories is also quite interesting , as he is a storyteller, and I find that the show we are curating together is somehow telling a story in itself. It seems we are collectively creating some sort of strange room , where some strange creature lives. Each of us are adding bits of our perceptions to one collective monster ! ( i mean that in a good way)
( This image is of an installation by artist Christof Kintera , where he made this 'light' man or monster from old communist lamps and bulbs)
Without really taking any drastic decisions , the collective idea of a mirror spaced room developed ,
and all our personal works seem to be related to the domestic, the home, the wall, wallpaper, patterns, doors , shadows, waiting , playing, time, suprises.
As already has been mentioned the two rooms will be like mirror imaged spaces. First of all Alice in Wonderland and Alice through the looking glass came to mind , where nothing is as it seems , or seems to be the opposite of what we think we know.
( This picture is from the student's office of Prague Academy of Arts where I study.)
Which reminds me a bit of Mike Nelson's installations. In Tate Britain you can see his installation The Coral Reef 2000 , which is a labyrinth of corridors and rooms , constructed by Mike Nelson himself. Every object, wall , space has been constructed by him like a builder and every object has been found in streets, skips, markets. Then he puts them together like a mosaic , creating a new space , which somehow reminds us of something we have already seen. It all seems familiar and yet it is eery and strange , not quite right. There is definately a presence in these spaces. Maybe its the memory of objects, or the act of getting lost, recognising but not quite knowing.
click on this to see Mike Nelson talk about his work in 2007
This short film is quite interesting in the way he talks about dealing with a gallery space , that when people think they are in a gallery they have to look at the work in a certain way , but that if you replicate a space and make people forget they are in a gallery , then the viewer becomes a player.
Also what he says about mirrors is relative to our work i think.
I find his work very much connected to Alice in Wonderland and the idea of mirror worlds .
In a book about Louise Bourgeois' installation "I do , I undo , I redo " ( 2000) there is a small passage about mirrors , as she uses these often in her work.
" When they were invented in France , mirrors were known as Psyché ,probably because of the ancient idea that the soul can be found in the 'shade' - the shadow or reflection of the mortal body.
The soulless , like vampires, cast no shadows and can make no reflections; in Romantic fairy tales , unwary students sell their shadows to the devil and are driven mad when they realise they can no longer see their image in the mirror; in the poetic dream films of Jean Cocteau , the Orpheus of "Le sang d'un poete(1930) and "Orphee"(1949) passes into the underworld through a mirror.
Mirrors are also a profoundly ambivelent metaphor: Narcissus drowns, after all, for falling inlove with his own reflection. Thoughts of beauty , sin, lust, especially of the female variety, are all instantly triggered by the presence of mirrors. For Louise Bourgeois mirrors have above all a psychological resonance:' reality changes with each new angle. Mirrors can be seen as a vanity, but that is not all their meaning. The act of looking into a mirror is really about having the courage it takes to look at yourself and really face yourself.'"
I can't really write about the seminars , as I was not present , but I did manage to listen to the last presentations and I remember the talk by Madeleine on Jeff Wall's photograph ' Picture for Women' ( 1979) comparing it to Manet's painting ' A bar at the Folies-Bergere (1882)
Both are seen ( painted and photographed) through a mirror which is quite relevant to our mirror reflected spaces. As for my own work I have decided to concentrate on shadows as a reflection of everyday life. I am making little silhoette cardboard creatures, which sometimes are recognisable , sometimes not. They are inspired from things I can see around me, and from drawings I have made since arriving in London. I like the idea that in shade we are all the same, that is dark, and yet have completely unique shapes. These shadows will then be stuck onto the window and the blinds will be pulled down , creating very subtle shadows of the silhouettes, so its sort of a double reflection.
All together they also create this random assymetric pattern. On the other window I will also stick cardboard silhouettes but completely different ones. So on the whole it will look very similar ; people will see shadows on the windows but they will be completely different ones from room to room.
See you on monday ! Jessie
No comments:
Post a Comment