An Architecture of Stains
Solo Exhibition
Location - MARS Gallery, Melbourne, Australia
Date - 2010
An Architecture of Stains is part of an on going project which investigates the generative potentials of stochastic phenomena and posits an art of the blot. Noticing the processes of time and the tracings of lived experience, giving a place to the imperfect, and giving value to the valueless, this project protests against the clearing away of the tabla rasa and the shadowless hygiene of the modernist project.
Reincorporating the living body with all its messiness into the ‘scene’ of architecture, an art of blots is not one of bounded forms but one of of shifting and indefinite fuzzy boundary conditions: it is an art of the teaming heap which does not proceed via an aesthetic reduction but instead is an ‘impure’ art of expansiveness, proliferation, and agglomeration.
An Architecture of Stains materialises the staining process as a reconfigurable archipelago of strange forms. As ‘a delay in wood’, each of the two-part stain forms is a kind of stoppage: time thickened and spatialised as peculiarly contoured and doubled. In these stain forms the movement of time is suggested as producing place by ‘holing’ as well as by ‘forming’.
Stacked in layers they suggest: topographic maps, toxic blooms and strange congealings; spread out they resemble modular templates for some possible new construction or the fossilised skeletons in an archeological dig. Thus they conform to a different temporal modality: apparently of time, they seem to be both ‘bygone objects’ and ‘coming to be’ objects.
In so far as these stain forms invite an ongoing redistribution and re-arrangement, they belong to those kinds of objects which refuse to achieve a permanent configuration, they invade the fixed image of stabile sculpture with a counter image of process. Inviting modes of play and improvisation they open out time. Indeed, as there is no ‘correct’ disposition or configuration of the work, there is no ‘end’ or finish to the work and the work is never used up in its multiple configurations.
Materials: MDF and enamel paint, graphite, medical staining agents, tracing paper, paper, laser cut acrylic, audience participation.
Links
Media:
Hélène Frichot, Landscape Australia, August/September 2010.
Radio Interview, Arts review, 3PBS, February 16, 2010.
