Traces (2021) – Journal

Artist Research

Camille Utterback

Entangled (2015)

The title of the work, Entangled, refers to the merging of participant’s physical traces on scrims in the installation, and also our ongoing emotional entanglement with digital systems in our lived environment.

Precarious (2018)

Precarious is an interactive installation that extends the historical practice of tracing human silhouettes with a mechanical apparatus on a backlit screen, by instead “tracing” gallery visitors with contemporary digital tools. Utterback uses a ceiling mounted depth camera to record peoples’ silhouettes as seen from above. Her software then continually interprets and redraws this data, rendering the silhouettes not with the stark fixedness of paper cut outs, but as tremulous outlines of bodies moving through time. The painterly aesthetic of Precarious builds on the algorithmically generated visual language which Utterback has refined over many years via her custom coded interactive drawing systems.

Liquid Time Series (2000 – 2002)

The unexpected permanence of certain elements (and the transience of others) hint at how both personal and cultural memory have a physical component subject to the unpredictable nature of decay.

Camille Utterback is a good artist reference as she works with time and electronics. She uses installations and audience participation in her works. She often uses the motion of the audience to portray a sense of time ect.

Alinta Krauth

Cartology Apology (2016)

A large scale, 18m long by 5.5m high by 3m wide projection rectangle that casts an image along six separate see-through scrims. This creates a holographic effect, and the height allows audiences to walk underneath the artwork down the isle. The digital work projected through the installation is frame-by-frame animation made from re-created topographical imagery drawn by the artist, taken from mountain ranges in Victoria, Australia.

By re-imagining existing topographical data, the artist seeks to question the concepts of mapping and geography, and understand it as a personal and fluid experience. More than just a data visualization, the data is thrown together in such a way that it becomes kaleidoscopic and intensely layered. The work also brings up the differences between westernized ways of viewing the universe, and indigenous ways of doing so in the areas portrayed. In 12 hours 11000 people came through the church to sit under the artwork. – http://www.alintakrauth.com/#!portfolio

Chantal Ackerman

https://archive.camdenartscentre.org/archive/d/chantal-akerman

In Gallery 1, To Walk Next to One’s Shoelaces in an Empty Fridge (2004) is an enigmatic two part video installation that traces the content of Akerman’s maternal grandmother’s adolescent diary, a rare document of considerable age, miraculously discovered after she perished at Aushwitz.

Manic Shadows – are consistently inconsistent and as such their installation together creates a sense of anxiety – distance between the characters projected, but also between the audience and the film-maker. The gaps left by a lack of linear progression or obvious narrative logic demand that viewers fill in the blanks and make their own associations. As scenes fold back upon themselves there is no distinction between inside and outside, visible and invisible, your interpretations or mine.

D’Est, translated into English as From the East, is a 16-mm experimental documentary film, shot in Poland, Russia and the former East Germany. The film investigates the stories of people’s lives in an unstable time after the collapse of the Eastern Bloc through the idea of memory.

Chantal Akerman – Manic Shadows (2013)

Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller

Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster

OPERA (QM.15) (2016) https://www.estherschipper.com/exhibitions/7-qm.15-dominique-gonzalez-foerster/

The title of the exhibition, QM.15, stands for French 19th century actress Sarah Bernhardt’s motto “Quand même”, which might be translated as “even so” or “nevertheless.” It can be understood as a reference to the high price the drive to create may exert on an artist, as Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster (DGF) has noted about the three characters which appear in QM.15: Sarah Bernhardt, Marilyn Monroe and Maria Callas, “they can’t stop, and art is their vehicle; their very lives must become works of art, no matter the cost. The supreme excitement is the artistic experience.”

Opera (QM.15) transforms a recording of Gonzalez-Foerster’s live apparition as Maria Callas into a holographic illusion that creates a ghostly operatic presence in a very large dark and empty space.

Teatro (QM.15) is a curtain ghost. The life-sized image of L’Aiglon by Sarah Bernhardt by DGF appears and disappears on a dark velvet curtain. Condensing multiple layers of historical and fictional associations, the actress is seen in one of her signature “trouser roles,” the part of L’Aiglon, in a play about the life of the young Duke of Reichstadt, son of Napoleon, written especially for Bernhardt by Edmond Rostand

13:25 Ugo Rondinone – THANX 4 NOTHING (2015)

Article – NEW YORK – UGO RONDINONE: “THANX 4 NOTHING (A TRIBUTE TO JOHN GIORNO) AT GLADSTONE GALLERY THROUGH JANUARY 18TH, 2020

thanx 4 nothing is an immersive experience, setting up the gallery as a black ox theatre that places Giorno front and center, split across screens as he reads a work expressing the titular poem in the work.  The piece is presented as a framing of gratitude for “everyone and everything,” with Giorno performing his work with his signature flair, reading the work with energy and zeal as he looks back over his life with frank insight and humor, reflecting on loves and losses, friends and enemies, sex and drugs, depression and spiritual acceptance.  The duality of Giorno’s presence, his interlocking intonations and gestures filling the gallery with his presence and his particular brand of spiritual zeal, is a fascinating look at the artist’s work and its framing by those he loved, and who loved him.  “May every drug I ever took,” he reads, “come back and get you high, may every glass of vodka and wine I’ve drunk come back and make you feel really good, numbing your nerve ends  allowing the natural clarity of your mind to flow free.”

Mark Leckey

O’ MAGIC POWER OF BLEAKNESS (2019- 2020)

A critique is that the exhibition was too stationary. Although Leckey uses a different environment other than the white cube of a gallery space (by bringing the work to a bridge underpass), the works itself are very stationary. There is no interaction between the work and the viewer (almost passive) as they just look at the videos/work. Its basically a normal gallery where you look at a work and move to the next work, but under a bridge.

Ibrahim El-Salahi

El-Salahi frequently draws on childhood memories and visions experienced during meditation for inspiration. In his words, he seeks to ‘register and describe what I perceive through the senses while remaining tightly bound to an elusive, indecipherable, metaphysical essence’ (El-Salahi, ‘The Artist in His Own Words’, in Hassan 2013, p.89). In Reborn Sounds of Childhood Dreams I the lines and forms are infused with spirituality and social consciousness. For El-Salahi, sound and line are closely connected. He has explained that lines form letters, which in turn inform sound and thereby enable communication (in conversation with Tate curator Kerryn Greenberg, 24 May 2012). This connection is explicit in El-Salahi’s title Reborn Sounds of Childhood Dreams I, in which he captures the fleeting, and often dramatic, moments when memory and dreams, past and present, collide. https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/el-salahi-reborn-sounds-of-childhood-dreams-i-t13979

Reborn Sounds of Childhood Dreams I (1961–5)

Artist using visual imagery to explore memory:

Asma Khoory – creates a large-scale canvas created from carefully dismantled and altered tea filter papers, acts like a map of time, with each square representing a passing moment. A smaller, sculptural work created using the same method, takes the form of a solemn figure resting on a pedestal, seemingly exhausted by each passing moment.

Salama Nasib – Shadow is a self-conscious, personal series of work that focuses on autobiographical memories. Using photolithography and blind embossing, the artist creates intimate, detailed works depicting a sense of what is there, and what is not, and considers how memories alter and fade over time.

Susan Hiller – Monument incorporates forty-one photographs of memorial plaques the artist came across in Postman’s Park, near St Paul’s Cathedral, London – Each plaque commemorates an ordinary man, woman or child who died while performing an act of heroism. 

Monument poses questions about the relationships between heroism and death, memory and representation. For Hiller, there is a significant distinction to be made between two modes of existence for each of the individuals commemorated in the plaques. She elaborates: ‘We could exist forever, inscribed, portrayed, as inscriptions, portraits, representations. I’m representing myself to myself… and for you, to you. This is my voice.’ (Monument, 1981, p.6.)

Angus Fairhurst – created works that try to physically erase the memory of man. He has manually blanked out man-made objects in geographically important places. This makes us think about memories of the earth before man, and the effect humankind is having on our world.

Asma Khoory – Recollection (2018)
Salama Nasib – Shadow (2018)
Susan Hiller – Monument (1980 – 1981)
Angus Fairhurst – Swissair, All Evidence of Man Removed
(1993)

Laurie Anderson

This three minute video features the artist telling an anecdote about a session with her psychiatrist projected onto a twenty cm high white clay figure. The anecdote involves the artist mentioning to her therapist that she noticed lip marks on a mirror and then, upon returning the following week, seeing they had disappeared. Initially, the psychiatrist questioned the artist’s perception and in what turned out to be the final session, admits that she learned of her 12-year-old daughter kissing the mirror. The therapist couldn’t see these marks from where she was sitting, and the maid had cleaned the mirror on Fridays. Anderson eventually comes to the conclusion that she and the psychiatrist see things from a totally different angle and decides from then on, to no longer visit the psychiatrist.

The installation serves to illustrate the anecdote told. The story and the form in which it is moulded are connected. The projection is a kind of staging, a décor in which the narrative has a natural place. Anderson plays with the space in which the projection is shown: a game of scaling up and down whereby the space in which the story takes pace is eventually relativized. Everything seems different from what it is in reality, both in the narrative and in the images shown.

Samuel Beckett

The mouth utters jumbled sentences at a ferocious pace, which obliquely tell the story of a woman of about seventy who was abandoned by her parents after a premature birth and has lived a loveless, mechanical existence, and who appears to have suffered an unspecified traumatic experience. The woman has been virtually mute since childhood apart from occasional outbursts, one of which comprises the text we hear. From the text it could be inferred that the woman had been raped but this is something Beckett was very clear about when asked. “How could you think of such a thing! No, no, not at all—it wasn’t that at all.” It seems more likely that she has suffered some kind of collapse, possibly even her death, while “wandering in a field … looking aimlessly for cowslips.”

Samuel Beckett, Not I (1971) Script

Bruce Nauman

Each version has been edited with slow-motion, colour change, and the addition of footage filmed during the rehearsals in which the action was deconstructed by a man’s voice shouting out instructions. The four looped videotapes are played on twelve monitors stacked up in four columns of three. This results in a wall of staggered action, sound and motion which intrudes aggressively into the space around it. The viewer is presented with a hypnotic repetition of pointlessly cruel and destructive violence which is both seductive and alienating.

Ryoji Ikeda

Walking Videos

Mark Wallinger – Threshold to the Kingdom, 2000

Martin Creed – You Return, 2013

Bill Viola

Tiny Deaths was made in 1993. Barely visible figures are perceived in the darkened space until crescendos of light and sound bring moments of drama. The three projections envelop the viewer in the intense experience of the appearance and sudden disappearance of these presences.

Confronts us directly on our ways of seeing and making sense of things and taps directly into recognisable and deep feelings which somehow remain elusive and worrying.  It is unsettling and strangely uplifting at the same time.

‘Going Forth by Day’ Montage, 2002

Going Forth By Day is a projected digital image cycle in five parts dealing with the themes of human existence – individuality, society, death and rebirth. The work is experienced architecturally, with all five image sequences playing simultaneously in one large gallery. In order to enter the space, visitors must literally step into the light of the first image. Once inside, they stand at the center of an image-sound world, surrounded by projected images on all the walls. The story told by each panel is embedded within the larger narrative cycle of the whole room. Viewers are free to move around the space and see each image panel individually or to stand back and experience the whole.

The five image sequences are approximately thirty minutes in length and play in synchronization on a continuous loop. The sound heard by each panel mixes freely in the space, creating an overall acoustic ambience. The images are projected directly onto the walls with no screens or framed supports, much as in the narrative fresco cycles of the Italian Renaissance, where the paint was blended directly into the plaster surface of the walls. The title of the work comes from the literal translation of the title of The Egyptian Book of the Dead, where the soul is freed from the darkness of the body to finally “go forth by the light of day”.

There is no beginning or end to the procession of individuals— they have been walking long before we see them here, and they will be walking long after they leave our view. The constant flow of people suggests no apparent order or sequence. As travelers on the road, they move in an intermediate space between two worlds. A small marker in the forest grants them safe passage through this vulnerable state.

Going Forth By Day by Bill Viola & John Hanhardt, Pg29
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