Gargoyle Inflexion (2012-2014), 01:41 mins video preview - 2 ‘panels’ of a 3-channel video installation
You treat the furniture like part of me
Various works, 2004–2012:
What began long ago by entering an old painting studio in my hometown to find a derelict chair with no seat and a broken leg, became a long-term obsession with performing everyday objects around sites of living and working – chairs, mattresses, ceiling panels, fluorescent lights, pink batt insulation, and so on.
You treat the furniture like part of me is a series of works, looking at how these quotidian apparatus act as go-betweens for feeling our way through the built environment. I ask how alternate approaches to performance, art and design might serve to displace their ergonomic affordances, to transform the way we affect and are affected by our surroundings. What planetary futures lie in wait for the becoming-architecture of bodies and buildings?
Projects:
pneu babel (2004), It pays to be thrifty (2005), We in will our beds be killed (2006), Here abandon all who enter hope (2007), Chaise traceur (2007), Uber stuhl (2007),
You tube my pink batts (2008), tablet/taster (2009), Prosthesis (2010), Gargoyle Inflexion (2012)
Gargoyle inflexion
Gargoyle inflexion (2012-14), the last in the series, is a 3-channel video installation, and one of two main creative works discussed in my Doctoral Research at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology’s Spatial Information Architecture Laboratory (the other being Chiase Traceur, 2007). Theorised through architectural thinkers Bernard Cache, and Shusaku Arakawa and Madeline Gins, the work poses a speculative fiction in which the historical archetype of the gargoyle returns as a contemporary figure of precarious becoming. Food, furniture, and the body combine to form a fragile co-existence, as I feed on my own brain, entering strange affective loops – or what i describe as an ‘autopoeitic cannibalism’. Food for thought.
Never one but many, the gargoyle is a hybrid chimera perched on the cusp of human and animal, embedded up to its armpits in architecture. In its contemporary guise it abandons the facade to find a new parapet - a stack of 5 chairs tethered together with tensegrity engineering. Rising up to gargle at the ceiling the gargoyle enters a loop of endless striving and a state of exhaustion. This is generated through the precarity of the chair stack, the strained musculature, and the constraint of the creature’s skin (black seaweed paper). The effect is intensified by the animated redoubling of the action in time and space, and the subtle reversal and perpetual looping of images in the three video panels – Portrait, Figure, Landscape.