2 – 3:30pm
Zoe Mendelson PhD Chelsea student
www.zoemendelson.co.uk www.chisenhale.co.uk
1:45 - 2pm Arrival (access to building only at this time)
2:15pm Performance & 2 - 3:30pm Studio visit/seminar
Chisenhale Art Place, Chisenhale Road, E3
Tube: Mile End Bus: 277 get off at Roman Rd or Victoria Park, Dress Warm!
(James Faure Walker & K Lovelock facilitate)
Documentation of this seminar by Marsha Bradfield. Originally posted on the CriticalPractice Wiki
Zoe Mendelson: March 9, 2010 - Chisenhale Art Space
Keywords: collage, articulations of (architectural) space, neo-baroque, old technologies - nostalgia, art that looks like art
- Zoe was concerned our discussion would focus on questions of installation - and how the artworks were working in the studio qua gallery
- There's lots to see
- Being in the studio complicates this critique - and the studio has been "curated" for the critique (?) The studio is in an constant state of curation.
- Cardboard desk - playing at school - numbers and codes
- Emphasis on assembly - collage - putting things together - creates new things - juxtapositions of objects with drawings
- Jo's interesting comment: It's easy to image/picture the stuff through a phone camera - very easy to frame
- Engaging with various articulations of architectural spaces
- Scale - shifts between macro and micro
- Old technologies - overhead projector, X-rays, assortment of projectors
- Scopic regimes - technologies of vision - internalizing and externalizing
- Different kinds of space - gendered space - gynecological box
- Do the artworks work on their own or do they need one another for support?
- Collage is very much about reprocessing materials - putting things together creates new things
- Subjects - and how we become subjects - what technologies make us subjects
- Various notions of work - various kinds of labour - undecidability of the status of work - is it finished; isn't it finished
- For me: It wasn't so much about Zoe trying to figure things out as her offering a space for psychic play - projection - somewhere to inhabit - prompts for imagining
- Choice of what's included in the collages - feels very controlled
- Sense this work is quite "knowing work" (a little self-conscious) - invites a particular kind of gaze
- Obsession - James' comment: It's all weird, it's all surreal, Chicago-style work (?) - both overly familiar and alienating - (cliche?) James used the metaphor of Grandmother's hanker-chief?
- Process - much of what we see is about something that had a life before - reborn
- When do you know when something is finished? In the case of the wall drawings, they're finished when they're erased
- Think it invites misreading - untranslated knowledge - may present other types of knowledge - how it was made - how the things were put together - practices of practices and various kinds of architecture and attention
- More interested in "how" things come together than "why" they come together.
- Questions around all the stuff seeming to come from the same era - think this relates to sense of nostalgia that pervades the artworks
- Zoe is interested in making things in a Luddite way - but also excited about other practices, other ways of working - including digital ways of working
- Homage, difference and hierarchy - bringing things together to create another system
- Neo-baroque - discombobulating - one space opening into another space - opening into another space - Gerard likened it to "roadkill" - Zoe spoke about desktop icons and how they open into whole new spaces - lots more information
- The work looks very much like art...Strikes me there's a tension between the artworks as objects (material) and them as propositions...(conceptual)
- Seduction by aestheticized technologies?
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