"There is something in every picture, no matter how well-structured a picture is, that escapes being shown." (Jeff Wall 1993)
The new unit is called "Show-No-Show". Photographs only ever show a facet or angle of something. They capture an instance in time, and freeze it there, as if, it is the only thing that exists about that moment (until the next photograph is taken of it). For Henri Cartier Bresson this is photography's decisive moment. Sculpture exists in the round, and through time (you don't ever see all of a sculpture at once) yet the potential for it to be there, as always, is strikingly different from photography. It has physicality for one...
Unit Two project is to make an installation that endeavors to discuss two-dimensional catered space and time using sculpture - i.e. to state the difference between what the photograph shows and doesn't show and use sculpture/installation to do it.
In other words you are to make a three dimensional statement (vis à vis installation) that discusses the limits, or exposes the "no-show" aspect of the photograph. Again, it is to use installation to "show" the no-show" in the photograph.
This unit resonates with some of the points John Berger Ways of Seeing, episode one were outlining. "For the first time ever, images of art have become ephemeral, ubiquitous, insubstantial, available, valueless, free." It is an artistic elaboration about what the group discussion uncovered 11 Feb, regarding aura. These aspects are part of theoretical essay writing by Walter Benjamin called The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.
For this unit project you can discuss the photograph in many ways. Principally you are re-investing the photograph with an aura of your own making. You take your cues from the photographic image itself and uses them to guide the installation construction.
With regard to project models, and references (on a kind of project spectrum) there is Panya Clark's artwork on the one end and Erin Shireff's artwork on the other. There is the taking a photographic still, and re-making it in the real (as if to elaborate on some fiction regarding the objects real or imagined existence) or to use the conventions of the artist monograph and photography and playfully use irony to build and expose the missing parts of the photograph using three dimensional form.
You are welcome to elaborate and develop a story based on what is imagined to exist in the photograph and use installation as the main production focus. You can work "backwards" or in this case make the sculpture and then photograph it and use the conventions of the monograph (with all the inherent strategies in photography - lighting, depth of field, focus, composition to name the principle ones, as well as develop a text to go with your sculpture) and present that as 'evidence' or as 'archive' to the real.
There are many ways to approach this project. Examples of artists working in this fashion include Panya Clark and Erin Shirreff. Early works of Canadian artist Liz Magor are relevant. Francis Alys's work "The Last Clown" (press <-- for link) demonstrates "behind the scenes" studio as a kind of archive to the final completed work.
Your job is as artist/curator. You are providing the broader context of the work. The source material comes from photography, or is in some manner derived from photography. It is to lay out the clues as to what one is looking at, or, to obscure them. It's to show, and not-to. A bit of a tease you might say....
