Art Fair 2010
VARIOUS PROGRESSIONS / notes on composition
Objects appear and reappear, progressing across the surface of the stage, referring to themselves and reading like the progress of history -– they are part logic, part chance, always revealing how the story was put together by its composer.
Starting with structure, the ground for the figures: a standard sheet of ply, as large and as flat as a billiard table, that surface upon which the laws of physics are played out through the movements of simple and identical objects. Here, each object is different. Each figure an illusion and illustration of physics at work - mirrors, moiré, objects miming movement. Sequences are laid out like stopped stop-motion animation, not quite connecting.
Diagrams of events, the making of the way things may have gone, or are going. Picking up histories, retelling them through images, sometimes embellishing en route to the present. Half of a facade reflects the desire for order, manifested in the symmetry of old architecture.
A walkman playing a short loop of distorted tape. One side of the player is removed, revealing the mechanics of the spindles, turning, yet fixed in place. The hand-lettered cassette reads various swiss prog. Whilst the larger tableaux suggests action, the only moving object on the surface moves only around itself - various swiss prog is neutral, un-progressive, remaining in the same place.
Free music? A found tape, a compilation of dubbed drone, repeating itself until the sound has become degraded beyond recognition. A set of compositions, removed from their concept-album context and reconfigured for easy listening, repeat their distorted story amongst a group of similarly manipulated objects. An intellectual treadmill or just going in circles. The reader, moving around the stage, is the one who moves.
Starting again - objects and events appear and reappear, pointing toward each other across the woodgrain. Five fluoro balls on ceramic stalks, five more sinking into their ground in progressive slices, another echoes the marbled yellow sun on the cover of Dune (paperback/mylar cover). Apparently Pink Floyd were invited to make the soundtrack for the movie.
Making progress: still in orbit, bringing back stories of discovery (desert worms, Spanish Flu, tunnels to and from St. Vincent’s under candy-coloured rocks and over the Exhibition Buildings). Scale is exploded or imploded to connect episodes on a single plywood sheet. Small sets of sets, theatres-in-the-round or chapters, enjoying repetition and confusing the sequence by recalling and foreshadowing all at once in every scene. Flimsy backdrops for actions which don’t ever happen, actions which are only proposed by objects which barely touch.
And after. The same objects, removed from the studio and remade inside the structure they refer to. Dispersed once again into more morphing sets, different groups, in various corners, changing, and repeating.
Starting with structure, the ground for the figures: a standard sheet of ply, as large and as flat as a billiard table, that surface upon which the laws of physics are played out through the movements of simple and identical objects. Here, each object is different. Each figure an illusion and illustration of physics at work - mirrors, moiré, objects miming movement. Sequences are laid out like stopped stop-motion animation, not quite connecting.
Diagrams of events, the making of the way things may have gone, or are going. Picking up histories, retelling them through images, sometimes embellishing en route to the present. Half of a facade reflects the desire for order, manifested in the symmetry of old architecture.
A walkman playing a short loop of distorted tape. One side of the player is removed, revealing the mechanics of the spindles, turning, yet fixed in place. The hand-lettered cassette reads various swiss prog. Whilst the larger tableaux suggests action, the only moving object on the surface moves only around itself - various swiss prog is neutral, un-progressive, remaining in the same place.
Free music? A found tape, a compilation of dubbed drone, repeating itself until the sound has become degraded beyond recognition. A set of compositions, removed from their concept-album context and reconfigured for easy listening, repeat their distorted story amongst a group of similarly manipulated objects. An intellectual treadmill or just going in circles. The reader, moving around the stage, is the one who moves.
Starting again - objects and events appear and reappear, pointing toward each other across the woodgrain. Five fluoro balls on ceramic stalks, five more sinking into their ground in progressive slices, another echoes the marbled yellow sun on the cover of Dune (paperback/mylar cover). Apparently Pink Floyd were invited to make the soundtrack for the movie.
Making progress: still in orbit, bringing back stories of discovery (desert worms, Spanish Flu, tunnels to and from St. Vincent’s under candy-coloured rocks and over the Exhibition Buildings). Scale is exploded or imploded to connect episodes on a single plywood sheet. Small sets of sets, theatres-in-the-round or chapters, enjoying repetition and confusing the sequence by recalling and foreshadowing all at once in every scene. Flimsy backdrops for actions which don’t ever happen, actions which are only proposed by objects which barely touch.
And after. The same objects, removed from the studio and remade inside the structure they refer to. Dispersed once again into more morphing sets, different groups, in various corners, changing, and repeating.
By Ash Kilmartin
