Te Tuhi Exhibition - Unpacking My Library - Week 3

Unpacking My Library is an exhibition about collections. It refers to disorder and rearrangement which may occur within a collection when it is unpacked or disrupted, and suggests different ways of ordering collections at the mercy of the collector or artist, rather than society's conventional orders. The viewer is invited to form an idea of the artist's character through the demonstrated collections, as well as to consider the process of collecting.

A key piece in the exhibition is Elizabeth McAlpine's Found Time Big Ben. This ongoing project features a collection of postcards of Big Ben, gathered and organised in rows to represent every minute of a 12 hour day, with the missing minutes left blank. She has organised this collection in an unusual fashion. Upon first attempting to find order, a viewer assumes there may be a chronological pattern over years, seasons, perhaps, or colour, composition etc, as the piece demonstrates Big Ben from many different angles and decades, and uses images from both day and night. The actual order may not be obvious to a viewer until explained. The artist is examining the way we unconsciously establish order in collections and how we automatically perceive certain orders. As a Londoner, I found the relationship between time, the landmark and tourism intersting - every time the clock chimes in London, there are large groups of tourists waiting underneath in order to hear the famous tune, and this strong relationship between the landmark, the time and the tourism is reflected in the postcards.


Found Time (Big Ben) is typical of McAlpine. It echoes her work Fiction Map (pictured). This ongoing work takes the viewer on a geographical journey through the states, from the East coast to the West coast, using text about landmarks and places from American fiction. The artist uses text to create her own map format. She is taking authors' creations and remaking them into a new piece of art. This collecting and rearranging of text in her own order of words ensures a new meaning is conveyed. Again, we have a disruption and rearrangement of order to create a collection. The use of text instead of shapes depicting areas in a map format echoes the fact that text and image can be seen as one and the same, visual code. In her work The Film Footage Missed By A Viewer Through Blinking While Watching The Feature Film "Don't Look Now", McAlpine has collected all the frames from a film which a viewer missed while blinking, grouped them sequentially together, and created a 7 minute 15 second long film. Here, she is keeping the order of time but concentrating on what the viewer was unable to see when he/she was blinking. TILT (In 6 Parts) encompasses 6 projectors in a row, projecting a sequence of frames from one reel of film. All the frames are white, except for one a group of red frames, appearing every sixth of the way through the film reel. This piece examines the order of time and space within film, highlighting film's temporal and surface qualities.

McAlpine rearranges collections to examine our perception of space and time, and how the viewer sees and interpretes order. She is interested in recycling collections to create new meanings, as well as emphasise what is already in existance, in a new light.

I found the sculptures by artist Dan Arps interesting. Some examples include little characters made of objects, objects on shelving, a chest of drawers covered in stickers, and other sculptures. They are a demonstration of arte povera, a movement signified by an exploration of a wide range of materials beyond the traditional, without restraints. Theoretical basis was rejected in favour of experimentation and openess towards materials and processes. This is evident in these pieces. The artist has appropriated existing objects, and the works are about the journey of the objects themselves, and their uses in the past and present. There is also a light hearted humour in some of the work, such as the cheeky looking characters he has created. I struggled to find deeper meanings in most of the pieces, but this makes sense within the arte povera movement, and they are all open to interpretation.

A piece I was particularly drawn and responded strongly personally to is shown in the image. It seems to me to be about pollution of the seas. The oceans contain a large amount of plastics and human refuse, and this piece reflects this directly back to the canvas in the use of such unnatural materials, literally creating an ocean of human waste. Objects are utilized which society may use and discard without thinking about, such as cleaning cloths, of course used with chemicals, which go down the drains. Chemical waste could also be demonstrated in the foamy, white-grey appearance of the majority of the piece. To me, it strongly highlights environmental issues with a black humour in the smiles of the stickers of dolphins and whales. Perhaps these innocent smiles also reflect the ignorance of a society which can cause so much pollution without realising/caring. The use of space is interesting also - it seems to be erupting from one end of the canvas, the empty space at the other end could indicate the problem spreading further, and the edge of the frame, the fact that we do not have unlimited natural resources. The impact of our collection of waste is considered here with a collection of found objects by the artist.

The exhibition showcased collections of very different themes and genres, and they conveyed individual messages in a variety of styles and media. Everyday objects can take on new meaning when collected together, recycled or displayed out of usual context, perhaps even become something else. Rearranging objects can entirely alter a viewer's perception of something, due to liberation from perception as per society's order which is imposed opon us.