Art PR Wire

September 8 – October 8, 2011

Opening Event: Thursday, September 8, 2011 6-8pm

AC Institute

547 W. 27th St. #610 and the AC (Exit) Project Space

New York, NY 10001

Graham Dunning: Loss Sheds a Light on What Remains

“Loss sheds a light on what remains, and in that light all that we have and all that we have had glows more brightly still.”

 - Michael Bywater, Lost Worlds.

Sound is temporal and temporary; a reproduced sound recording is a physical, analogue approximation of a thing that once was. Hauntology can be defined as something which is simultaneously backwards- and forwards-looking. As Dunning’s first solo show outside the UK, this exhibition collates some early, non-site-specific works establishing these as some of the main themes in his practice.

Untitled with Records and Hammer (2009)

Viewers are invited to smash a vinyl record with a hammer, on a workbench. The diminishing pile of unbroken records and the growing amount of detritus form part of the installation. The records used were each carefully considered and bought by the artist in an attempt to become a professional DJ. As such it is a personally cathartic piece and an autodestructive rebirth, acting as a meditation on ambition and failure.

Untitled (2008)

Found bottles are hung at heights determined by the numbers on their bases, in an order prescribed by chance-determination; a corresponding composition consists of the pitched-down sound of each bottle being tapped, assigned to a note according to the same numbers. The work is the culmination of a pseudo-archaeological investigation through an imagined narrative, questioning the “objectivity” of an object.

Stutter (2009)

Visitors are invited to read into a microphone from a children’s book while wearing headphones: The sound from the microphone is delayed and fed back to the readers, causing them to stutter and slur their speech. The nostalgic use of a children’s story book clashes with the frustration of impeded reading.

Chris Stockbridge: Relative Space, Son/Husband

Relative Space looks at a family relationship shown in an expanded moment of time. It is made up of a series of still images extended with film editing software and looped. The still camera becomes a witness to time passing rather than the index of an event.

The time which emanates in the work relates to the ‘crystal image’ described by Deleuze where the image somehow fuses the past of its subject with the present of its viewing. Yve Lomax has it as time escaping chronology which is uniquely rich with unlimited potential.

‘When the present is thrown into question an interval opens up in time …it is when the present of a moment splits and gapes open; when the present itself becomes an interval.’ (‘Sounding the event’ P94)

Time is stretched and distorted in the repetition and resequencing of single frames. Elements of recognisable gestures trigger memory and take on disquieting echoes of the claustrophobia and frustration of family life. The viewer is held by the shifting gazes of the subjects replacing the viewpoint of the artist. It is a performance witnessed by her, played out under her gaze as wife and mother.

A space between stillness and movement, between the photographic and cinematic, is created outside of time’s normally perceived linearity, where expectations of the narrative of family relationship are subverted. It is a time where thought slows and the mind might wander allowing the unconscious to surface and the possibility of new understanding of the familiar and familial to emerge.