Tag: installation

A Perfect Place to Grow pays homage to the artist’s Turkish Cypriot father who, she says, is a fantastic gardener but a terrible carpenter. It consists of a wooden birdhouse-like structure on wooden stilts. The little wooden chamber has a sloping corrugated iron roof and an old wooden stepladder attached to the side which the viewer is invited to ascend in order to look through a small peephole. Inside the birdhouse a short video loop plays (originally shot on super-8 but transferred to DVD). It features Emin’s father walking back and forth through vegetation in a bright, hot sun. Wearing a pair of blue bathing trunks and a cloth sun-hat, he pushes through the fronds of tall, swaying, reed-like plants. He approaches the camera carrying a pink dahlia in one hand, which he extends towards the viewer. After smiling and blowing a kiss, he turns and walks away, his brown back disappearing into the foliage. The same footage repeats with a red flower held in the other hand. The sound of cicadas chirruping loudly in the heat accompanies the visual drama. On the floor beside the hut on stilts is a single wooden trestle, constructed by Emin’s father, surrounded by flowering plants in pots such as geraniums, clematis and lilies and a green plastic watering can. The artist has stipulated that this should be full of water because she likes the idea that she could come into the gallery and water the plants herself.

Much of Emin’s work features members of her family as well as death and depression. The words ‘the perfect place to grow’ originally appeared on Emin’s first quilt, Hotel International1993 (private collection), appliquéd below the name of the Margate hotel once owned by Emin’s father, Hotel International. In her text work, Exploration of the Soul 1994 (Tate T11887), Emin describes the idyllic early years she and her twin brother Paul spent at ‘the giant hotel’ before bankruptcy forced her father to sell it and return to Cyprus. The separation of her parents was the impetus for a series of disappointments followed by intense disillusionment with life as a result of being raped at the age of thirteen. The Perfect Place to Grow may therefore be read as harking back to a kind of ideal beginning before the shattering exodus from childhood paradise and the severance of paternal relations. 

1) Tracey Emin, A Perfect Place to Grow, wooden birdhouse with metal roof, wooden steps, wooden trestle, plastic watering can, plants and film, Super 8, shown as video, monitor, colour and sound (mono), 2590 x 2950 x 2000 mm, 2001 at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh

2) Tracey Emin: Hotel International & Tracey Emin in bed, lying under Hotel International, with Jay Jopling at the Gramercy Hotel, New York, 1993, © Steve Brown / Courtesy White Cube

3-5) Tracey Emin, Sometimes the dress is worth more money than the money, film, 2000

6)  Tracey Emin, A name they called our dad , 2002, embroidery and text on paper

7) Tracey Emin, Dad, 1993, 4 photographs, colour, Chromogenic print, on paper, ink on paper, wood, glass and resin block, dimensions variable 

8) Tracey Emin, Hotel International, 1993, applique quilt, 257 x 240 cm. Private Collection, New York.

9) Installation view of Tracey Emin: 20 Years, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh

Connie Merriman, Tree House, 2010

Materials

Dawn Redwood tree, light, paper, wood

Artist Statement

I have always wanted a tree house. When I was young, I spent a lot of time in the top of a cherry tree that grew in a wood adjacent to my home. You could be quiet in the branches and watch animals walking the paths below. I thought it would be good to have a shelter for myself in the tree so that I could be more safe and comfortable. Now I think of a tree house in another way. In a gesture to address the issues of stewardship, this fragile house is made to shelter a tree, and the natural world it represents, from humanity’s built environment. It is a house for a tree.

Source: mattress.org

Vito Acconci, Making Shelter: House of Used Parts, 1985

Materials

aluminum ladders, pup tent, rubber tires, wooden doors

Description

The compact shelter constructed of discarded materials sits in an inner city garden, lush with flowers and foliage behind a plain wooden fence. Four chair backs, made from aluminum ladders, hold up a pitched roof consisting of two doors in a wooden frame. Between the chairs is a pup tent which doubles as a table base. Climbing one of the ladders up into the attic-room, you find rubber tires fastened closely together to form a hammock.

Source: mattress.org

Kiki Smith, Flight Mound, 1998

Materials

silk-screened fabric, cotton batting, silicon bronze

Description

The Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh provided Kiki Smith with their extensive collections as source material for her installation. She made detailed drawings of a variety of pelts from birds that nest in western Pennsylvania. The drawings were made by scratching lines directly into Kodalith film, and were then transferred to 25 different silkscreens.

Smith printed the bird drawings onto printed fields of color that were based on the feather colors of the birds. The printed fabric pieces were trimmed, numbered and then photographed. Smith used the photographs to design the quilts, which consist of two or three segments from different printed pieces. She chose to combine Eastern European floral print fabrics for the backsides of the blankets. We constructed the 68 blankets by piecing together the floral printed fabric, matching it to front pieces at random.

The forty black patinaed bronze bluejays in the exhibition were cast from a wax bird carved by Smith. Smith rearranged the packing quilts and the cast birds several times before arriving at their final configuration: a single mound, with a black quilt on the top, allowing only the edges of the ones beneath to be visible with the 40 birds across the gallery floor oriented in a single direction.

Source: mattress.org

Félix González-Torres, “Untitled (Placebo — Landscape — for Roni),” 1993. Candies, individually wrapped in gold cellophane, endless supply, Ideal weight: 1,200 lbs., overall dimensions vary with installation.

Roni Horn, “Paired Gold Mats, for Ross and Felix,” 1994-5. Gold, 49 x 60 x .0008 in.

“As the following text by Felix Gonzalez-Torres illuminates, Felix was moved and influenced by Roni Horn’s work well before he knew her. Subsequently, they became friends, sharing a dialogue of rare intensity. Felix was very good at maximizing the strongest aspect of each of his relationships, and he touched and was touched by many. However, there were very few people who Felix felt akin to in as many fields as he did with Roni-artistic, political, and personal.

The format of Felix’s memorial was primarily the reading of letters exchanged between Felix and others. Roni was one of few people asked to speak-at Felix’s request. The second text below is a portion of that poetic text.

excerpt from “1990: L.A., "The Gold Field”, by Felix Gonzalez-Torres
from Earths Grow Thick, Wexner Center for the Arts Roni Horn exhibition catalogue, 1996

L.A. 1990. Ross and I spent every Saturday afternoon visiting galleries, museums, thrift shops, and going on long, very long drives all around L.A., enjoying the “magic hour” when the light makes everything gold and magical in that city. It was the best and worst of times. Ross was dying right in front of my eyes. Leaving me. It was the first time in my life when I knew for sure where the money for rent was coming from. It was a time of desperation, yet of growth too.

1990, L.A. The Gold Field. How can I deal with the Gold Field? I don’t quite know. But the Gold Field was there. Ross and I entered the Museum of Contemporary Art, and without knowing the work of Roni Horn we were blown away by the heroic, gentle and horizontal presence of this gift. There it was, in a white room, all by itself, it didn’t need company, it didn’t need anything. Sitting on the floor, ever so lightly. A new landscape, a possible horizon, a place of rest and absolute beauty. Waiting for the right viewer willing and needing to be moved to a place of the imagination. This piece is nothing more than a thin layer of gold. It is everything a good poem by Wallace Stevens is: precise, with no baggage, nothing extra. A poem that feels secure and dares to unravel itself, to become naked, to be enjoyed in a tactile manner, but beyond that, in an intellectual way too. Ross and I were lifted. That gesture was all we needed to rest, to think about the possibility of change. This showed the innate ability of an artist proposing to make this place a better place. How truly revolutionary.

This work was needed. This was an undiscovered ocean for us. It was impossible, yet it was real, we saw this landscape. Like no other landscape. We felt it. We traveled together to countless sunsets. But where did this object come from? Who produced this piece that risked itself by being so fragile, just laying on the floor, no base, no plexiglass box on top of it…. A place to dream, to regain energy, to dare. Ross and I always talked about this work, how much it affected us. After that any sunset became “The Gold Field.” Roni had named something that had always been there. Now we saw it through her eyes, her imagination.

excerpt from An Uncountable Infinity-For Felix Gonzalez-Torres-February 1996-by Roni Horn as read at Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ memorial

A field of waves, perhaps an ocean: up close two different tiles recur to form a puzzle in which the image of water coheres. Among these tiles a labyrinth forms as my gaze loops between them and the water.

I am attracted to the little edibles, brightly colored candies mostly, as I partake of the metaphor that would send you around the world. I am a bumble bee-who would pollinate the world with you.

Images of sky, birds, water, murdered people, and certain colors stacked in measures of some critical mass. Each image forms a slice of some lesser but more acute mass that as a letter going out into the world whole, is only completed when it finds the place it is destined for. Each slice signals its own fate.

I am cast into an abrasive and exquisite consciousness.
Everything of me, everything outside of me is tempered by it.
I am laid open.
My skin, my consciousness are turned to glass.
The only risk left now is that of openness.

Framed by sky, buildings, roadways, and signs, the photographs out there on the street-between food and home-bring enigma near. And these enigmas recur. They are riddles that implicate public and private, you and me, us. They open up an Egypt-like space, when Egypt was mostly desert and when Egypt was mostly desert without parking lots, even vacant ones.

You are more nature. Your life is a rare form of transparency through which I have observed the world becoming more present to itself and through which I have become more present to myself. And in all of this, I recognize you, Felix, as another weather.”

—Andrea Rosen Gallery 

“Writing about González-Torres’ unmade bed billboard, Muñoz elaborates what he means by disidentity thusly: “There is in fact nothing to identify with — no figure, no text, no gesture, barely an object, only an absence. What is evoked is a ‘structure of feeling’ that cuts through certain Latino and queer communities but is in no way exclusive to any identitarian group. I am suggesting that the image connotes a disidentity, a version of self that is crafted through something other than rote representational practices, produced through an actual disidentification with such practices and the public/private binary.” The artist’s golden landscape portrait of Horn could be said to operate similarly. The work is not only on the ground, but it is all ground; there is no figure, text, or gesture. Certainly there are the objects of the individual pieces of candy, but even these constitute an absence as viewers are meant to consume them. The work does not depict Horn, but performs a feeling, it feels, it feels like her, a feeling that, to take into consideration the etymology of the work’s parenthetical descriptor placebo, is pleasing. Horn’s work is, by comparison, more restrained — it is smaller and consists of less pieces — and more precious — it is comprised of pure gold rather than cellophane-wrapped candies. It exists as a sort of compressed and refined version of González-Torres’ placebo landscape. Yet, it still functions in the same way, being less about any one-to-one correspondence between its materials and its referents and more about the commonality, the being-in-common, it evokes.In his essay on Horn’s prior work Gold Field that instigated the artists’ friendship, González-Torres carnally highlights his intuition of just this aspect of the work: “Recently Roni revisited the Gold Field. This time it is two sheets. Two, a number of companionship, of doubled pleasure, a pair, a couple, one on top of the other. Mirroring and emanating light. When Roni showed me this new work she said, ‘there is sweat in between.’ I knew that”

—From BETWEEN THE GROUND AND THE SKY | Daniel Sander