Memory, is an imperfect collage. By creating confusion and distance between images and the words that describe them, between the sounds, music and spaces of an experience, issues of interpretation and language not only arise but also become part of the content. The viewer is left to examine their own experiences against the everyday narratives told in these works. The video, photography and paintings of were shown as part of the Emerging Artist Series at the Essl Museum of Contemporary Art in Vienna, Austria from November 14, 2002 until November 24, 2002. I combined images of contemporary train station and airport architecture with elements of cinema, the use of handmade puppets, and written fictional scripts. I am interested in the peripheral everyday stories that can occur to anyone in these “in-between” locations of public space. Although these experiences are collective on one level, they are, in my work, told or articulated through the subjective eyes of a single individual. My multi-disciplinary approach to narrative is one that finds inspiration from the history of painting, documentary and fictional film, radio plays and television. My work finds it’s setting in modes of travel and memory. Yet most importantly my work is about the psychological and emotional differences between casual, intimate and confrontational human interaction. The processes and strategies I used resulted in some unusual collaborations and aesthetic decisions. These include working with the Dutch police to create a photographic series about memory, painting with oils on carefully prepared panels sprayed with car paint, and creating puppets from paper-maché that re-enact the imagined and remembered experiences of confrontations in a train station. In these works, I allowed for different and seemingly contradictory versions of an experience to exist side-by-side, these differing versions can relate to the relationship between the human and the industrial, public and private and between subjective and objective viewpoints. My narrative raise questions about social responsibility as well as the collective desire for privacy, love and intimacy. In fact all the works to be exhibited have been named after popular American love-song titles from the 1950’s and 60’s: My baby just cares for me, I’ll be seeing you and I put a spell on you. I appropriated what some of these songs stand for, their nostalgia, emotion, and even absurdity, and although the songs themselves are not actually heard in the work, if one knows or hears the song, the context of the music can be quite suggestive. The viewer is left to examine their own experiences against the everyday narratives told in these works.
I put a spell on you, script (a sound piece to be heard on headphones)
