installation

Images of Installation at the National Library

These images are of the latest installment of my ongoing Found Bookmark Project which is currently on show at the National Library on Kildare Street in Dublin. The piece (which involves a collection of objects found in libarary books over the Summer) was made for Preponderance of The Small, "an off-site project which forms part of The Douglas Hyde Gallery's ongoing Gallery 3 initiative, featuring works by twenty-one younger artists working in Ireland."

Michael Asher and Willem Besselink

About a year ago I wrote a post about a Michael Asher installation at the Santa Monica Museum of Modern Art. For the installation Asher reconstructed, as open frameworks, all of the temporary walls that had been constructed for the museum 44 previous exhibitions (picutred above).

I noted at the time that it reminded me of an old idea I had discarded invloving mapping all of the artworks that had been exhibited in an exhbition space. A Dutch artist named Willem Besselink has just seen the post and lef t a comment to say that in 2007 at a gallery called Moire in Utrecht he had done something very similar. His project involved constructing framewoks outlining the space occupied by all of the artworks exhibited in a gallery during the previous year. The video below documents the construction and dismantling of the piece. The different colours relate to the different exhibitions. 

Jorge Machi

Jorge Macchi is an Argentinean artist who makes work in a range of different media. The piece below is a disco ball in an empty room with holes crudely punched in the walls, floor, and ceiling to allow the reflected light to escape. It was featured in The experience of art, curated by Maria de Corral for the 2005 Venice Biennale.

More at http://www.jorgemacchi.com

 

You see I am here after all

The title of this post was taken from a postcard found by the American artist Zoe Leonard. It is also the title of Leonard's exhibition at Dia Beacon which comprises approximately 4000 postcards of Niagara Falls, dating from the early 1900s to the 1950s that the artist collected in flea markets and online auctions.

En masse, they reflect decades of changing technologies during which the motif of the Falls, shot from a few standard vantage points, was revisioned: hand-colored, over-painted, cropped, or otherwise manipulated in accordance with changing notions of truth and taste.

More info here

Fabiola - Francis Alys

I read about Francis Alys' Fabiola project quite a while ago but never posted it at the time. Here is some info:

Commissioned by Dia and installed at the Hispanic Society’s Beaux-Arts facility in Manhattan, Fabiola comprises almost three hundred portraits of the Christian Saint Fabiola, all of them copies of a lost original. The paintings will be installed in the Society’s mahogany-paneled North Building Galleries from September 20, 2007, through April 6, 2008. Alÿs’s collection will be seen within the context of the Hispanic Society’s unique collection of Iberian and Latin American art, engaging a dialogue between these historical and contemporary collections.

more info here

I have decided I'm going to try and do at least one blog post per day for all long as I can manage - today would be day 2.

 

Letter from 1979 Found in Library Book

Below are some excerpts from a letter I found in a library book at UCC while working on The Found Bookmark Project for a group show at the Lewis Glucksman gallery.  The letter is dated 1979 and a note has been added by another student which is dated 1983.

2 mount pleasant, gardiners hill, Cork

3rd December 1979

Dear Mr Quigg,

I am prompted to write this letter because, once more, the encyclopaedia of philosophy has been vandalized. This encyclopaedia as, no doubt, you are aware, is housed in the reference library and is constantly in use by staff and students. Not only has volume 7 been missing for some years, but today I also noticed and reported that a huge portion of volume 4 has also been cut out by some "wanton". Because I have constantly reported the fact that vloume 7 is missing to no avail, I have now little confidence that the missing portions of volume 4 will be replaced in the immediate future, which is why I have decided to write to you...

...As it now stands it is notoriously easy not only to rob books and journals but also to steal other people's belongings from the library. It would seem ro me to be totally unfair, and somewhat naive to expect students to leave bags and coats outside the library area, or in the case of the reference where they are not in the owner's view, where there is no one to attend to thse belongings. Many people, including myself, have had our possesions taken from these areas. In the case of the science library that area for coats and bags is inadaquate and one's coat is often knocked off and trampled upon...

...I trust that my complaints and suggestions will not go unheeded,

yours sincerely,

Anne O' Neill (M.A, Student)

April 1983

This Anne O'Neill person sure knows how to complain!

Jimmy Lynch (1st year student)

Work in Progress for "Bookish" at the Lewis Glucksman Gallery

Here is a preview of some of a new version of my Found Bookmark Project which I am working on for an exhibition called Bookish at the Lewis Glucksman Gallery in Cork. I searched the library at the University and collected a lot of material that had been left behind between the pages of books. I found some interesting stuff including a letter dated 1979 with a note added by another library user in 1983. The letter is a complaint about vandalism of the Encyclopedia of Philosophy and library security in general.

Here are some scans of objects:

nihilismweb.jpg

brownmould.jpg

asthma.jpg

maths2.jpg

target.jpg

 

Michael Asher Installation

asherspan.jpg 

Here's another post about something I've seen on the NY Times website. There's a review of an installation by Michael Asher which reminds me of an idea I had for an exhibition which I discarded. I was thinking about mapping all of the artworks previously exhibited in a gallery. I was thinking of it as a drawing project with the outlines of the works being traced on the walls and floor. I decided the idea was a bit too self referential; a case of "art about art."

 "Mr. Asher has reconstituted all the temporary walls built for the 44 exhibitions that the museum has mounted since they moved there in 1998. Not the whole walls, just their skeletons  the shimmery aluminum studs, paralleling and intersecting one another in so many crazy ways you can barely see through them."

Asher's installation suceeds in going beyond "art about art" because it is engaging on a number of levels. As well as its conceptual basis it works on an aesthetic and spatial level. For regular visitors to the museum the installation will stimulate memories of previous exhibitions, encouraging them to try and recall which wall was constructed for which exhibition and recall there own personal experiences of the exhibitions.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/08/arts/design/08ashe.html?ref=design

http://www.smmoa.org/index.php/exhibitions/details/191