An Extended Family.
The installations for this exhibition all belong to one family. Some of them are new-born and some have survived and evolved through several generations.
In new technologies, generations are short. The grandfather of the family was only born in 2005 - though conceived several years earlier - under the name of House Guests. It was a room with a fixed camera, a computer and a screen. The screen showed a film recorded on a fixed camera, mixed with live video from the same camera showing the spectators in the same space as the film.
October 2008- January 2009
Curated by
Muriel Venet & Sarah Mattera
FIXED CAMERA
NSTALLATIONS
After a private debut in early June at Nicolas Schoffer’s Studio in Paris (on the invitation of the artist’s widow, Eleonore) it passed the summer months in an architect’s house in Brittany before travelling to the Yokohama Triennial in Japan for its public debut. It was a little clumsy at first, needing constant supervision, dropping video frames and regularly crashing. But all in all, it survived its travels well. A year later it turned up on the other side of the world in Limerick City Gallery of Art under a new name, Here Then and Now, and with four little offspring in tow. Over the winter it had been thoroughly overhauled and remodelled and it was during this time, when it went briefly under the name of Avant-Pendant, that the family HereThereNowThen was born.
The second generation of the family owes much to the father, although they each have their own defining character. Unlike their father, none is particularly concerned about the past. But, like him, each is concerned with the present, in fact with the continuous present. Now is a continuously changing drawing of the present moment, erasing itself as it moves on, while Here sees only what is moving through the present, perceiving stillness as emptiness; Here and There sees the passing seconds as contrasting stripes of black and white; Now and Then shifts the three colours of it’s camera eye to watch how bodies move through the present.
Two years later, after many scattered individual appearances, the family is re-united for a pompy doo in Paris. The father is now a grandfather, with a couple of third generation installations making their public debut and two more in the nursery. Plucky and robust, the newcomers can do things their parents only dreamed of. But the older members of the family have the benefits of maturity; debugged with fully developed software, faster processors and more memory, as well as an acumen that can only come from experience.
Despite their electronic nature the family are all gregarious in character. From the beginning they have invited in visitors - adults, children and even pets - to converse with them and to challenge them. And they have continuously invited artists to perform with them: musicians, dancers, actors, even standup comics... They can be grave or comic, meditative or burlesque, straightforward or elusive, always in deference to their guests.