At First Sight
Installation including a series of paintings on canvas, drawings on paper, vitrine, a wall drawing
Radoslav Putar Award exhibition
Galerija Galženica, Zagreb, Croatia
The project takes the form of a museum-type presentation through which we discover more about near and distant places. Here, the work deals with notions of travel, time, imagined places and the connection between a subjective / intimate, and an objective / general view of a situation. This is about the mystification of a journey and a description of non-specific place, place in transit, in-between coming and going, arrival and departure.
The area described is a place where we might start to idealise, and to create a picture of our aims and goals.
Thinking of maps and flows leads to ideas of travel, physical travel, imagined travel, transport, the travel of information, points where one links with another, and areas where connections are missed or where crossover fails. The work deals with the idea of an invented journey and with various ideas about interconnections, one of these being the potential interconnections which link the drawings that are presented here, and thus narrate a journey.
The drawings depict open places, deserts, and oceans. They tend to articulate two positions, i.e. looking upon a coast -or land- from the sea, and looking upon the sea from the coast. Obviously there is a-albeit subtle- relation to dialectics of insider/outsider, and more specifically to the possibility for these positions to be interchangeable.
Although the drawings describe quite different, perhaps seemingly unrelated places, they are produced using a similar technique, i.e. pencil drawing which are based on found photographs, and images downloaded from the web, in this case the drawings employ blurring and heavy use of silhouette in order to effect the intangible and the dramatic. Their common mode of production draws them together as a set, to the point where they may appear to be stills taken from the same single film.
It is immediately clear that the work addresses ideas of locale, places where journeys are steeped in mystery and folklore, places where stories are started and where emotions -perhaps romance- connected to arriving and departing are still present. In this series the heroic physical journey, the epic traversing of terrain is idealised whilst also being shown as romantic fiction, as a type of travel which is obsolete.
At First Sight
Pencil on paper, from the series of 3 drawings shown in a vitrine
30 x 40cm
At First Sight I-III
2006
Acrylic on canvas
90 x 124 cm