Two possible routes

Hey!

Things have been ticking along, despite an apparent lack of activity here on the blog – here’s what we’ve come up with in terms of direction for the project:

1: The Room
Using either a room in a real house (when artists open house time comes around) or a created one in a gallery space – create an authentic room as evacuated by an unknown party, leaving behind a collection of belongings and a mystery as to what could have happened to that occupant.
The work entails creation of items, or finding objects and re-purposing them. For example, if I were to find an old mobile phone, I could fill it with text communication that would be relevant to the story we were telling, and have it as an item in the room for viewers to find and interact with. Or I could create a number of photographs, manipulated in photoshop to place our character in various locales or with certain people and have them in a photo album, or on the walls, giving the audience a greater insight into who that person was, and where they might be.
This idea has strengths and weaknesses, in that both re-purposing a real room or creating one from scratch is a big job! Also, a story need to formulated and a very specific user experience needs to be tested. However, this idea is the closest thing to what I personally want to do in terms of interactivity with an audience using artwork that doesn’t at first appear to be artwork.

2: The Wall
Our second idea is much simpler and is sourced from both recent work we have seen at the Prescription gallery in Brighton and from Kate’s newest painting.

You can find out more about the piece on Kate’s site.

And here’s some work by Heavy Artillery…

…might be tricky to see, but the work on the wall is sprayed onto a whole bunch of canvases that are fitted together. Buyers (after the exhibition has run it’s course) can take their little bit of the work away. I think it might be more interesting for the people to come and take their bits away and leave the holes, but anyway:

Our idea with this in mind is to create a mural with more artists than just Kate and myself, painted or printed onto many different canvases that form a single wall. We’d then wallpaper over the wall, and invite an audience to begin clawing away at the paper, to reveal the work underneath. Why? Because this still taps into the idea of something being hidden and slowly revealed. There is still that process of discovery and delight, albeit in a much simpler way that what was outlined above in the room idea. You might tear away at the wall and be horrified at what you see there – or intruiged, or pleasantly surprised. I’m very keen on the idea of seeing someone very tentatively peeling away at our wall having no idea what might lie beneath. An unfortunate downside, is that all artists involved would not be able to reveal what they had submitted to the project until after it had been exhibited and revealed – so we wouldn’t be able to show you the process of creation in this blog. Or maybe we would, to a degree! I’m not sure at this stage.

So then – I think both ideas still cater to our original intention of having a story to tell and a mystery to reveal, and we’ll have to have a think about which path we want to take. Although – the is no reason we couldn’t put The Wall…inside The Room, is there?

Only time will tell!

What will they think of us?

Mega update in the pipeline, but first a little thought that help to better describe what it is Kate and I are doing in terms of letting objects tell stories:

My mrs. and I would often have the discussion “what would people think of us if were both to die somehow, and all that was left of us was our stuff in our house? what would people make of us?”

In our flat, there’s all manner of crazy stuff. We’ve got an Edwardian prosthetic leg with a bunch of dead roses sticking out of it in our fireplace for a start – never mind our weird taxidermy collection. People would get, I’m sure, very very mixed impressions of the pair of us based soley on our belongings. Or maybe we’d just be written off as a couple of weirdos. But it’s interesting to think that the things we display in our homes show a little bit about ourselves, if that is all there is to make a judgement from.

Just a thought, heh.

some local history & inspiration

Waterloo place, built between 1822 and 1820 (above, as it looked in 1946).

Named waterloo place after the Battle of Waterloo in 1815.

At no 11, lived the architect Charles Augustus Busby, who designed and built most of the Regency Brighton architecture.

Above:

Next door to Waterloo Place: Developers bought most of the 1820s houses to build fresh offices, but Miss H. Silvester who had lived at No. 9 for 50 years refused all offers for her property and refused to budge. The new blocks were built either side, and her house shored up. She was in the house when the photograph was taken on 15 February 1970, some years after the offices were built. She died in March 1974, aged 89. Her house was then demolished and the offices linked up.

Above, Waterloo Place in 1967. All the houses were mostly demolished…I have yet to find out what then happened…more to come soon.

‘The room, after she left’

I read a short erotic story some time ago that had just popped into my mind.

Sadly I dont have a copy anymore, but I should be able to get it back off the person I gave it to.

Its an erotic story, obviously, but aside from that, its a description of a hotel room by a man whos secret lover has just left. He is remembering the room before she arrived, and after she left.

I kind of like the idea of creating a room where *something* has happened…something which can be guessed, but not found out for definate.

Picnic at Hanging rock

Ahoy.

Watched ‘Picnic at Hanging Rock’ last night. It’s about a trip by a party of girls from Appleyard College, an upper class private boarding school, who travel to Hanging Rock in Victoria’s Mount Macedon area for a picnic on Valentine’s Day 1900. The excursion ends in tragedy when a group of three girls, and later their teacher, mysteriously vanish after climbing the rock. No reason for their disappearance is ever given, and the one girl who was later found and rescued has no memory of what had happened to the others.

Firtly, it’s not a great movie. However, it performed really well right accross the globe, primarily due to the ambiguity of the tale – it’s never resolved what really happened, but we are presented with a series of clues that are nearly impossible to decipher into a logical explanation. The novel upon which the film was based, did originally have a definitive ending, but was removed by advice of the editor. It certainly served the book well, but much later that last chapter was eventually published in its own book, along with extra bits written to reinforce the idea that these events really did occur. The ending is just so insane that no one could have predicted it, so it’s probably just as well that it wasnt included in the book or the movie.

This goes a long way in explaining what I’ve mentioned about ambiguity being a big part of the longevity of a tale.  Neat endings are good for some stories, but in this case, it has inflamed the minds of many, frustrated some and haunted others. That’s real narrative power.

Read more about the story right over here.

Sources

It’s occurred to me that I haven’t mentioned what started this idea off in the first place. here’s a couple of little stories that stuck in my mind and put me on to the idea of places and objects telling stories:

In the Kubrick movie version of Lolita, Charlotte Haze explains to Humbert as to why there is a gun in her dresser. It belonged to her first husband, and is the weapon he used to end his life. She keeps the gun in the top drawer of a dresser, wrapped in a handkerchief. Atop the dresser is an urn of his ashes, and on the wall above is a picture of him. At least, that’s how I remember it. She describes the gun as being a ‘tragic treasure’. A turn of phrase that I ‘ve become very fond of. Anyway, later in the film, Charlotte has discovered the monstrous truth about Humbert and her daughter and runs crying to this dresser, and crys and screams at the urn and picture, apologizing for her past mistakes and making a final goodbye before running from the house. Humbert had planned to kill her with the very same gun. I’m not explaining what happened terribly well – but I’m trying to get across the idea that this little shrine in her room held an awful lot of power, and went a long way to define her character.

I’ll tell the second story another time – as this post is getting a little too long.

Generating a narrative

So if we’re gonna tell a story, we…need a story to tell!

We’ve got no shortage of writers in our midst, so what i’m thinking is:

Issue a challenge to our writers thus – you must come up with a short story that must mention a certain collection of objects, be set in a certain time period, have this number of characters, and contain these certain themes, and these events.

We can then either pick one, or elements from all the stories to begin crafting the artifacts. If we keep the criteria for the story as loose as possible, and let the writers choose, i think we’ll have an easier time, plus we won’t be restricting their artistry too much, no?

random ideas?

could we build a spooky black tree in the middle of a gallery space?

that could be interesting.

snippets continued

Some photos ive collected so far with regard to spaces…

As for your ideas, I’m liking how its sounding…keys in locks seems a little too obvious choice, but I see where you’re going. For some reason, point and click adventure games keep coming to mind. Picking up objects, and possibly clearing up some kind of mystery is of interest to me.

What’s it all about?

The basic idea for the remnants project (from my point of view at least) is to use our skills (and potentially the skills of others) to create something in the vein of what the very clever Punch Drunk Theatre company are doing in terms of transforming a space into something recognisable, something possibly domestic – something real and identifiable. A simple room, say, a bedroom. Say I tell you this bedroom belonged to a little girl who vanished. No one knows where this girl has gone and maybe it’s up to you, who is standing in her now vacated room, to find out.

What follows is merely examples, to give you an idea of what it is we’re trying to achieve.

Ok, so I’ve told you you’re in this room, right? Of this girl who’s mysteriously vanished. I’m presenting this room to you – perfectly transported or recreated or whatever to the building you walked into. It’s as good as the real thing. Everything in it is as real as it should be. Right down to the lighting, the smells even.

You can touch and interact with everything in this room. You might not want to, but you can.* You look at the pictures on the walls. Posters, photographs of friends. There’s a desk with one of the drawers slightly open, the other one locked. The key is plainly hanging off the bedpost.

…and thus starts your little adventure. You can see there’s a locked thing – and a little key for it so…you’re going to try it, right? What’s in that little drawer?

Well. I don’t know. Stuff. Something. Something to precipitate some kind of next step in drawing you into a mystery.

Tell you what – I’m actually thinking of that scene in Silence Of The Lambs**, where FBI Agent Clarice Starling goes to one of the killers victims homes, and the parents have kept their daughters room exactly as she left it. Starling investigates, and finds some pictures of the girl hidden inside a music box, amongst other things.

…I’m not suggesting that our project be as clearly defined as a situation like this – I’m more interesting in presenting a collection of fabricated objects, made to appear real, which somehow communicate a story like the one I’ve just described.

*in a recent exhibition Kate an I visited, this was exactly the case. The artwork was an installation comprised of a tiny makeshift room behind a hole we have to duck through in the exhibition rooms wall. Was it real or part of the show? We didn’t touch anything. It made me quite nervous. As if someone might rush in behind us and we’d be trapped with the owner of the dwelling. I think maybe an instruction would have made it more likely for me to spend more time in there, picking things up and examining them – or would that have ruined the authenticity?

**Just as I typed ‘silence of the lambs’ the song from the soundtrack that the killer dances to in his basement just came on itunes. I’m deadly serious. I’m freaking out now!