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Choose Your Time

Choose Your Time
2007
Series of four paintings, acrylic on canvas, 80 x 120cm
Shown as part of Croatian Contemporary Art, Lalit Kala, New Delhi, India/ and
Ground Lost, Nova Gallery
Curated by WHW, Zagreb, Croatia

The work is 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 in which we might start to idealise, and to create –through looking- a picture of our own references, 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 invented journeys, and with various ideas about interconnections, for example the potential interconnections that link the works, and thus narrate a journey.

The paintings depict open places, deserts, and oceans. Obviously there is an -albeit subtle- relation to dialectics of insider/outsider, and more specifically to the possibility for these positions to be interchangeable.

Although the paintings describe quite different, perhaps seemingly unrelated places, they are produced using a similar technique that employs blurring and heavy use of silhouette in order to effect the intangible and the dramatic. These might be seen as conservative and sentimental paintings, as direct depiction of scenes which, while they might remind of ‘primary documents’, might just as easily have been randomly sourced from the web, or from any novel or non-fiction book on travel and adventure. In this sense the work touches on issues of access and availability, on the ways in which we now come into contact with the places and journeys which are being evoked here.

Their common mode of production, as well as their cinematic/panoramic scope 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.