Title – DOCUMENTS Fragments

Description
A wall hung exhibition and a series of five performances.

Exhibition comprised of;

• Oil paintings made in response to photos of Francis Bacon’s Study for Portrait II (after the Life Mask of William Blake). On the adjacent wall I exhibited the library book that was my source of the images. The paintings were made to be the same size as the Bacon originals.
• Two photo index cards showing self portrait photographs of Jeremy Castle, a man at various stages of his life between 16 and 40 years. The thumbnail photos were evidence of his various stages of self fetishisation.
• Two framed watercolour paintings painted by Mary Taylor a woman in her 90’s.
• A torn paper composition where one sheet of sugar paper had been torn into nine equal size pieces and arranged on a base sheet identical to the first one before it was torn.
• A painted study of my wife Susan, painted in the weeks prior to the exhibtion.

Performance description;

• Holding a video camera at waist level the performance began by me filming the viewers as they entered the space.
• I asked for a volunteer to take control of the camera for me.
• After asking audience members for accessories for me to wear during performance, I sung songs of emotively pitched vowel sounds.
• Then I led a spoken tour of the works in the room. I spoke about my artworks and collected objects as well as a main sculptural work by another artist also exhibited in the room.
• At the beginning of the performance I asked everyone to make a mark beside their date of birth on a page of pencil written dates. There were date sheets for each of the four performances.
• The performance ended with me reading out all our dates of birth in reverse chronology.

2008
MFA exhibition at Generator Projects
Documentation by Owen Daily and Pernilla Spence