I find installation art more thought provoking than paintings or drawings. I personally feel unchallenged when viewing such artworks. Perhaps it is the often similar format of a rectangular/square canvas which has ‘just been painted.’
Don’t get me wrong, I still go to galleries and see paintings which are awe-inspiring and way beyond any painting I could wish to create, I just feel that paintings make for ‘easy-viewing.’ By this I mean that very rarely do I stop to look at a painting for a long period of time because I don’t feel the need to. It is as though I have seen all that I need to within a minute or so.
Installations, on the other hand, I believe require a greater investment. When an artist creates an installation it has the ability to be anything and to use the space in a multitude of different ways. With paintings, despite a few exceptions, the work is most often hung on the wall in a standard format. What I guess I am trying to say is that if you go to a painting exhibition you can pretty much guess what to expect, with installation anything could happen.
When I think back over the work I have created during my Fine Art Degree, some may think it odd that my final show is to be an installation. Many are probably not aware of my great interest in this area of art given that the majority of my artwork has been painting/print based over the past few years.
I have previously mentioned within this blog my struggle with creating work using only one medium. It, therefore, makes sense that when beginning to think about what my final show should be I was reluctant to exhibit only my prints. Despite my fondness of these particular pieces of work, I felt like they needed something else, more of a context perhaps. Hence why I made the decision to exhibit them within an installation piece.
Over the course of this project I have not looked a great deal at artists who also produce installation based work. As I began to relentlessly research as much as I could to find the most fitting contextual references, I let myself think back to the very beginning after finishing my dissertation and what I had said in my degree project proposal.
Doris Salcedo and Christian Boltanski both featured within my presentation as I reflected upon memory and the idea of ‘absence as presence.’ I didn’t fully acknowledge until now how much my work still relates to these two artists who have played an integral role in my ideas over the course of my final year at university. Within my dissertation I discussed how Salcedo and Boltanski both use processes to distress their work in order to convey trauma.
The distress present in my work is intended to reflect the vulnerability of memory, more specifically my own memories. In context with Salcedo and Boltanski, however, I have begun to consider how my work could convey trauma also. It encourages me to ask questions like ‘Am I traumatized by my lost memories?’ and ‘Is there any other reasons why I want my work to be imperfect?’
I don’t think I would go so far as to say that I am ‘traumatized’ in any sense, although, I do think that imperfection has been a thread through much of my artwork over the years without me realising.
As I begin creating my installation in which I want everything to be ‘distressed,’ I felt the need to look closer once again at the work of Boltanski and Salcedo and how their work is displayed. I believe there are similar elements in both artists’ work to that of my own.
I have posted before about the relationship between my anaglypta prints and Boltanski’s re-photographed images and how both have suffered a loss of clarity. Salcedo, I feel, is most similar in her use of familiar items which convey a certain sense of nostalgia and unease both at once. This outlines very much so my intentions for my installation, for the viewer to recognise the objects and connect with them whilst at the same time being forced to acknowledge their demise.
