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Summer Studio

Helen Grogan

Melanie Jayne Taylor

13 Jan - 15 Jan 2011
3 DAYS ONLY

Gallery One and Two

 

Rather then leave the gallery empty over the holiday season this year, Melanie Jayne Taylor and Helen Grogan were given the keys to Blindside and, starting from scratch, asked to have an exhibition ready in four and a half weeks, a duration far exceeding the usual two-day installation time. From this Thursday the public are invited to view the results that both highlight and fracture the boundaries between idea inception, exploration, creation and presentation.

Editions

Helen Grogan has developed artworks within and specifically for the Blindside exhibition space through the Summer Studio Program. The process has been steered by the vigorous application of a single task. This task has been formulated through identifying and distilling reoccurring desires in Helen’s artistic process, particularly her approach to the dramaturgy of space and viewing.

Task: to make an occurrence apparent through a system or procedure transparent to the viewer.

Helen works as an artist and curator in Australia and Europe with a trans-disciplinary and cross-contextual approach to contemporary art. She has studied philosophy and contemporary dance, including the Specialised Choreography program at the School for New Dance Development (NL). She is currently completing her Masters in Art Curatorship, at The University of Melbourne. Helen often works collaboratively with artists and theorists, using strategies related to ‘practical philosophy’.

This project is the first time Helen will exhibit autonomous work since departing from contemporary dance in 2005. “Post-mortem of the collective gaze” recalls and restructures systems of registration prevalent in her previous work for contemporary performance. “I miss you so much I want to put you in my home (outside/inside)” achieves the set task with a simple minimal action designed for one viewer at a time.

Special thanks to Dr. Elisabeth Boender, Michael Spurrier and Julian White

 

Editions

The Spaces Between

In January 2011, Melanie Jayne Taylor undertook a Summer Studio Residency within blindside’s gallery space. Using imagery from her extensive photographic archive, Melanie Jayne explored the physical capacity of the photograph to open up a dialogue between image, sculpture and architecture. “My methodology attempts to tie photography back to the way that we experience things in real life. Time operates in an organic and continuous way – but our experiences and recollections are fragmentary.”1

Employing the medium of print photography, Melanie Jayne’s sophisticated imagery manipulates and transforms time through the considered placement of the photographs within the exhibition space. These “… brief and arbitrary glimpses draw attention to all we are not seeing in order to address the complicated world outside the frame.”2

Playing with the architectural features of the gallery, the photographs offer a series of partial views into the world that complement the window panels, its grid acting as a metaphor for how photography frames subjective experience. The plinths provide an additional mechanism for placing, ordering and viewing the pictorial content of the work, playing with notions of sculpture in relation to the room’s

Melanie Jayne Taylor’s installation invites us to recollect and reflect. Glancing out, across and over, we are drawn into a forest, a room, an abandoned observatory; we are presented with the residual fragments of images and events that inspire us to construct our own narratives. A story unfolds, quietly, out of time. A monumentality glimpsed fleetingly; a life within and beyond. Have we been there before? Perhaps. Now, but not of this time.

 “All events in their passing, leave traces; burned into images, imprinted on surfaces, or imagined in memory. The traces that remain (that become remains) memorialise this past presence, and … it is in attempting to preserve these moments in time that we inevitably demonstrate the impossibility of such an act of preservation: what is made more tangible is not the thing itself, but its absence.”3

Melanie Jayne’s installation echoes and resonates long after the act of viewing it, promoting an ongoing journey of possibilities and potentials.

Sarah Edwards

Endnotes:
1. Melanie Jayne Taylor, 2011
2. Kirsten Swenson, 2010 on Wolfgang Tillmans. cited Art in America, June/July 2010
3. Chris Handran, 2001 for Susan Fereday, After image (I Am What Remains)

 

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