General-Specific
General-Specific, installation view
- Year:
- 2003
- Materials:
- Various
General-Specific was an exhibition at Project Arts Centre in 2003 which brought together three bodies of work in an installation, which created links and connections between the works, weaving personal and historical narratives. The curator, Grant Watson, wrote an essay on the exhibition, which can be downloaded below.
Decade-ism, Years, and Decade-ism (early & late) are each sculptures in the form of texts denoting years, decades and periods of time. Each is formed from clear glass tubes used in the making of neon signs. The tubes do not emit any light, as they are not filled with gas, nor connected to electric current, rendering the objects transparent and at times nearly invisible.
The Correction Drawings I-IV is a series of works on paper. Each is a drawing made after the same post-mortem photograph of the artist’s father taken during his wake. The starting point in these drawings was to make an image that addressed the uncanny quality of the photographic representation of the dead man’s face. Drawings were made to correct the incorrect facial features based on prior knowledge or memory. This process proved impossible, and a process of subtraction of the ‘incorrect’ details of the image resulted in area of the paper being cut away. Progressive attempts resulted in substantial areas of the paper being cut away in the form of circular holes.
Correction Drawing IV was featured again in a later work, Sequences, Scenarios and Locations, Part I – After Hänsel & Gretel, where the disk-like paper cutouts were a prop in a reworking of the fairy tale, where Hänsel uses bread to find his way out of the forest after being abandoned by his parents. The original photographic image was used again in Sequences, Scenarios & Locations, Part II.
Seminal II (after the year of the artist’s birth and Colliers Encyclopaedia Yearbook 1970, covering the year 1969) is a three-screen slide projection installation. Over 300 photographic images from Colliers Encyclopaedia Yearbook 1970, covering the year 1969, were reproduced as slides. The Encyclopaedia Yearbook is from a set purchased by the artist’s parents in the 1960s from a American travelling salesman, resulting in a particularly ‘America-centric’ representation of the world becoming a central part of the artist’s childhood.
Images (installation view):
83-86
Images (The Correction Drawings, I-IV):
Downloads:
.