The first antechamber
Gabriel Lester, Charlotte Moth and Alexandre Singh, with Maria Fusco
Project Arts Centre, Dublin
As an antechamber, the exhibition operates in the space between the dual pillars of story-telling: narrative and image. The signifiers in a work of art here lose their predictability there are smoke-screens, chance relationships and red-herrings. What can an assemblage of image and story-lines mean within works which have both highly scripted and tenuous inter-relations?
The first antechamber proposes that a destabilisation of narrative form might relinquish the viewer from the responsibility of linear comprehension.
Gabriel Lesters film All Wrong is built entirely from downloaded images and videos, based on a story written with Aaron Schuster. Whether the images illustrate the text or are tagged to the text, or whether the text drives the image or vice versa, becomes increasingly less important as the function and constructs of film and narrative unravel. Charlotte Moths Installation for Dolores is a revolving slide collection of photographs combined with a voice-over. Commenting on the images, the voice is at times knowledgeable, silent, or fleetingly engaged. The narrative itself becomes curiously detached from the collected images, leaving the viewer questioning what that relationship might be. Alexandre Singhs sprawling installation A Thousand and One Knights of the Roundtable of Knottingham, unpacks the architecture of art inviting the viewer to combine a narrated text with the materials featured in the story. Props (insulation foam, plaster board and construction adhesive) provide the structure on which a colour-field video is projected, each colour a notional illustration of a specific idea in the wildly fantastical and internally-referential story. Maria Fusco, who hosted a round-table discussion at Project Arts Centre, has also curated a series of kissing-couples: books of fiction and theory, entwined and available to be read in the Project foyer.
A Symposium A Banquet
Sunday May 13, 2007, 5.30pm
Bruce Maus Incomplete Manifesto describes the in-between times as those where the best ideas, or real growth, stem from. This is an attempt to revert to the original meaning of the word symposium, as a social occasion for the exchange of ideas and shared food and drink by curating an evening of formal and informal knowledge exchanges.
Real growth often happens outside of where we intend it to, in the interstitial spaces – what Dr. Seuss calls “the waiting place.”
Lectures are being prepared for the evening by an irrational selection of people who will cumulatively provide lessons from a vast array of knowledge disciplines. Ranging from science to fashion and philosophy to sport, the lectures will also undulate in length depending on the speaker and their topic anywhere between 5 minutes and 40 minutes. Have you ever desired to know how to tear a phonebook in half? What really interests you about the weather? What is the legacy of Chris Burdens seminal performance action?
Visual Arts at Project Arts Centre are curated by Tessa Giblin. A Symposium A Banquet is co-produced with Fiona Hallinan.
Please contact Aisling McGrane aisling@project.ie for further information on all exhibitions.
Limited bookings for A Symposium A Banquet at Project Arts Centre, Dublin: 353 (0)1 881 9613/4
