"I would say we all practice it even if we don't like the word conceptualist or conceptualism. What we're practicing is no longer an attachment to something finite, but rather a willingness to work with the uncertainties and the constantly evolving experiences we have in the world, which are of course in our current condition largely brought to us through the agency of technology." Ian Carr Harris
Premise: Unit Three looks the dematerialization of the object of art (Lucy Lippard). It is to analyze and to situate an instance (whether it be an event or an object) and provide evidence to the structure and make-up surrounding that event or object, whether of its making, or of its demize.
It is to illustrate the larger trajectory that its evolution can be said to exist (i.e from before it was assembled, or after it came apart).
It is to discuss in an artwork how we construct our understanding of something, whether it be a condition, a thought, a situation, an object, a story, a figure, an image, and how the conception of it is informed by the maintenance of it as a static whole.
See the work of Gillian Wearing, Rachel Whiteread (House), Ian Carr Harris, Adad Hannah (Two Views), Francis Alys (When Faith Moves Mountains, 2002)
It uses the photographic image as a metaphor for this idea, that at some point things are held together but will eventually fall apart. (A literary reference to this it Alan Weisman's book "The World Without Us", 2007).
Photographs, particularly documentary photographs capture and represent a given instance in time. That all moments leading up to the photograph and all instances after will have shifted or changed and perhaps no longer even be in existence. It is what legendary documentary photographer Henri Cartier Bresson referred to as the decisive moment.
This project is to address in an artwork the shifting nature of an object and how "we assign a hierarchy of value" to it according to what we know---> how we arrive at the conception of what something is, that the conception of it unfolds in time. We learn about something, or have a notion about what something is and we either maintain that conception, or it is forgotten. It is influenced according to new information or of new conceptions. We assign a value to it.
PROCESS: There is a constant evolution, or progression to the state of how things exist. They are assembled and absolute only for an instant, and only for the time in which we perceive them, or elaborate on them in our mind.
This is an open project that uses installation and/or photography.
