Recent workshops with Estella have been challenging , but opened up so many new avenues for work and thinking; being asked to create moving image is new (to us all i think!) but the opportunity to develop refinements and multiple iterations resulted in surprising developments.
Given a colour, we were asked to design an exhibition. I received BLACK- the colour of my city (Dunedin!). I associate black of course with New Zealand, but not so much as i do Dunedin- the Gothic city of dark and moody weather, fashion and architecture. But it wasn’t those elements that drew me…
BLACK is the night, and the idea of the night seemed to me to so perfectly embody the the stillness, the sense of isolation, of quite, perhaps of loneliness that Covid has brought to us. Black is mysterious and dark. Black is dangerous and unknown. Black is fear and death and eternity…
So black became the perfect colour to try and focus in on this historic moment in time- to be able to think about living in the time of Covid. I hadn’t really thought about it in terms of my practice before- how i might make work in response to it, so this became an amazing task to tease that idea out- even if there was no actual physical work, to try and create a mood, a setting; some visual manifestation of this moment may be possible.
A diversion. Throughout our exercises and tasks with Estella I was amazed at how my ideas flowed together. I would take an approach from one task, and reapply it to the next, hopefully better. I would take new processes from new tasks and apply them to new versions of old tasks- it was interesting to find myself working with certain techniques again and again in new combinations. But most importantly for this exercise was the return to, i think, our very first task.
Estella asked us to create a list of 15 inspirations and to send her links. I think the intention was for them to be useful for our video work. At the time i think i missed the specificity of the task but amazingly much of the content came to influence, if not be directly be drawn upon, in my BLACK ‘exhibition’.
From my list I retrieved my love of the film of Michelangelo Antonioni, and I decided to title my ‘exhibition’ La Notte / The Night in reference to his film. Antonioni’s film, like others he made at this time, focuses on a sense of alienation and disconnection- the difficulty of maintaining human relationships. For Antonioni the context is the changing society of post-war Italy, and of a new generation having to grow up in its legacy. There is something there that seemed resonant to a global pandemic induced lockdown… Also- it’s in black and white.
So Antonioni’s Le Notte became a key touchstone and i decided i would project a segment from this film, silently but with subtitles, on one of the 4 walls of my exhibition design, a room painted entirely black with a black floor and a singular center table, itself wrapped in black polyurethane plastic.
Music is always important to me, and I instantly recalled one of my favourite albums- both for the music and the LP cover- Joy Division’s ‘Unknown Pleasures’. A haunting album that itself grapples with a sense of alienation, its cover art work is a complex graphic of white lines on a black background. Distorting this artwork, I imagined it stretched along a wall with nothing other than the exhibition title “La Notte /The Night: Love, Longing and Loneliness in the Age of Isolation.”
On a third wall would be projected the phone captured video footage i recorded driving home through the rain, on a largely empty state highway, late one night. The occasional headlights flash past, road markings emerge and swish by, as do road signs. The footage captures both the sound of rain and the plaintive and melancholy chords of Bach’s ‘Goldberg Variations’, played by Glenn Gould through the car stereo. This i imagine playing in the exhibition space itself.
Of jewellery, i imagine a few spot lit pieces hanging on the final long wall. Maybe five? Not many. It a fairly quite and meditative kind of concept… in the center is the polythene wrapped table, with a few more pieces to be picked up, lit from a couple of low hanging lamps with black shades.
It was an amazing exercise to undertake- i don’t see how i would have ever conceived of it for other than by this task, and i’m excited by the prospect of maybe one day creating it. All it needs now is some jewellery…
