Exhibition: When Contents Become Form. click for gallery
When Contents become Form is a sculptural installation constructed from gallery press releases and relates to the context and experience of visiting galleries.
The work was created in the gallery from a stack of art gallery press releases collected from across London as well as donated by other artists from their own visits here and abroad. These A4, documents, homogeneous in form, were shredded on security level 2 shredder in the gallery and individually looped over invisible thread to create a hovering white cube above a black reflective plinth, to increase the sense of boundlessness.
The installation was located within a square footprint with equal room for the viewer to walk around the work to experience the illusion of solidity, fragmentation, focus and unfocused vision. The shreds gently sway in repose to the viewers movement and the gallery drafts.
The work was made in response to many years of visiting galleries and explores the relationship between the viewer, the artwork and the A4 press release, so prevalent in many galleries. It is the both the physicality, content and purpose of these documents that both please and irritate Jeannie.
"The press releases often appear as a veil to the exhibition,
condensing and compounding a set of thinking and testing knowledge, and references. They are tools of enculturation and reinforce the power relationship between gallery (artwork) and viewer. In When Contents Become Form, these statements, are shredded - reprocessed, retaining snippets of words, alluding to their history, and juxtapose varied documents. The resulting installation presents alternative views, from a solid white cube to clear vistas through the work.
...Shredding the paper, the part destruction of content, leaves words or snippets of information visible but not readable as a linear experience yet the fragmented representation homogenises the content. The shredding process leads the focus to away from the content to the materiality of the page. This process homogenises the content. " JD
The title,'When Content's become Form', is a reference to an exhibition originally presented in 1969 as “Live in your Head: When Attitudes Become Form,” and represented in 2013 under the title ‘When Attitudes Become Form: Bern 1969/Venice 2013” by The Fondazione Prada at Ca' Corner della Regina in Venice 2013 in the Venice Bianale.
The exhibition was originally curated by Harold Szeemann and explored themes of curatorship and relationships between the artworks and elimininating the need for outside context.
“Harald Szeemann, a curator capable of thinking beyond the limitations set by critics’ labels and the theoretic associations of his time. Characterized by a new approach where everything was left to the liberating process of doing, where the viewer was not impeded by boundaries, protection systems, pedestals or perimeters, the exhibition became a dialectical field of encounter between the individual artists and the curator, between the event and the architecture: a place where the works formed links with each other, in a kind of continuously-evolving organic weave.” Fondazione Prada website
http://www.prada.com/en/fondazione/cacorner#exhibition!
