Plus + Minus
Strange Neighbour, Melbourne
December 2014
Strange Neighbour, Melbourne
December 2014
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Plus + Minus
I love a good spring clean; after years of culling, prioritising and curating the objects that stay and the ones that go; prompted from moving house (locally, interstate or combining assets with a new partner) I have developed a keen awareness of the things that are talisman’s of disposable periods and those which are important icons of my existence. Friends and past lovers have been stunned at my ability to quickly and efficiently determine whether something goes on the THROW or KEEP pile. I am constantly collecting but only the very treasured will stay and become concrete when my home is culled. The desire to collect and compile, instigated by having no objects but only memories of my childhood and teenage years. The process isn’t foolproof; there have been regrets over objects that later jump into my head and I momentarily hate myself for getting rid of them, and also those that had been damaged or lost. There has been furniture which I have bought and then regrettably sold- not pushing hard enough for storage or trying to make a coupling seem effortless; I was only kidding myself. In the past I have tried to emulate or replicate the memory triggered by the missing. It never works. It is always compared with that which came first - eternally placed on an impenetrable pedestal; unattainable by newer duplicates or re-imaginings due to nostalgic memories. Tracey Emin’s Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995 AKA The Tent is a work completed in 1995 that was appliqued with the names of everyone Emin had ever slept with. Restricted not only to sexual encounters but those with whom she had enough trust in to go into the unconscious with. The work was owned by Saatchi and destroyed in a Momart London warehouse fire in 2004. Emin has refused to make The Tent again despite insurance offers saying that the materials and their sentiment from her and her family’s possessions used no longer existed therefore making the work unable to be remade. In October, 2014 at Jerwood Gallery, Hastings Jake and Dinos Chapman unveiled what they called a “homage” to Emin’s The Tent titled The Same Thing, Only Better– a visual duplicate of Emin’s work in similar materials and colours. The intent of the Chapman brothers to re-imagine the lost work and call it homage to me is a falsity. When discussing the work they stated that for something not to be able to be replicated or duplicated due to sentimentality is against art – this alone seems to demonstrate that The Same Thing, Only Better is not an homage but is a no-brainer. If this is homage than arguably so is Stanley Kubrick’s version of The Shining to Stephen King’s novel. In the 1980 film a red VW beetle (the colour driven by the Torances in the 1977 novel) is seen destroyed by collision in one scene within the film; Kubrick’s Torance’s preferring to get to The Overlook Hotel in a yellow beetle – killing off the novel on the silver screen - making what was King’s now Kubrick’s. A similar fate can also occur with objects that do stay in my home- things that reached their pinnacle in a certain position in a certain room in a certain home and never looked as good ever again. These things often get shuffled around; put behind objects, in cabinets, at the top of the wardrobe. They often stay; providing that when we are reunited I feel the same as I did as when we first met - staying for another house or repurpose. Currently a ceramic urn being moved around for years including having lived in the soil of a prickly pear is about to be turned into a lamp. No aspect of the urn will be paid homage too – it will just be a lamp that, if anyone is ever interested, used to be an urn.
Justin Hinder, November 2014
justinhinderwords.wordpress.com
http://strangeneighbour.com/plus-minus/
Plus + Minus
Strange Neighbour, Melbourne, December 2014
http://strangeneighbour.com/plus-minus/
Plus + Minus uses the idea and location of the lounge-room and domestic furnishings as a platform/environment, questioning the ‘ideal’ embedded within these materials. A central objective of the work is the exploration, manipulation and questioning of the meanings and history attributed to materials, objects, forms and production processes. Furthermore the project takes its cue from various objects in the world, looking at the history of display and the similarity of form between street signs, bollards, gymnasium and sport equipment, western ideograms, alchemical and mathematical symbols and measuring equipment. Through the choice of materials a dialogue between the hand-made and machine production is evoked. Components from prior works, which are embedded with the history of their previous incarnations, are reworked into new assemblages. In this way the work become an indefinable and multifaceted temporal collage of different locations, meanings and ideas, which inhabits a state of flux and resists a definitive point of definition.
Text: Rebecca Delange
Photography: Strange Neighbour
Strange Neighbour, Melbourne, December 2014
http://strangeneighbour.com/plus-minus/
Plus + Minus uses the idea and location of the lounge-room and domestic furnishings as a platform/environment, questioning the ‘ideal’ embedded within these materials. A central objective of the work is the exploration, manipulation and questioning of the meanings and history attributed to materials, objects, forms and production processes. Furthermore the project takes its cue from various objects in the world, looking at the history of display and the similarity of form between street signs, bollards, gymnasium and sport equipment, western ideograms, alchemical and mathematical symbols and measuring equipment. Through the choice of materials a dialogue between the hand-made and machine production is evoked. Components from prior works, which are embedded with the history of their previous incarnations, are reworked into new assemblages. In this way the work become an indefinable and multifaceted temporal collage of different locations, meanings and ideas, which inhabits a state of flux and resists a definitive point of definition.
Text: Rebecca Delange
Photography: Strange Neighbour
