Before and After the Event
By Victoria Lucas
The works can be thematized as a series of considered and poetic interactions with objects and places. Focusing on urban public spaces that frame the everyday, works punctuate the ordinary so that relatively minor happenings are revealed as monumental events.
Searching for unintentional monuments becomes a process, and structures, stories, places and moments are studied for resonant content. The encounters developed are imbued with metaphorical significance, devised in response to each subject’s inherent value as an artifact or structure. Wider cultural, social, political or historical perspectives are unearthed and alluded to as original contexts are removed.
The recognition of each subject and its worth as a monument is developed through an encounter with a place or situation. Prevalent occurrences or issues surrounding the chosen site may form a general situation from which particular works are developed. This objective search for meaning within a specific place results in site-related works that articulate the past, present, future. The extraction of an experience removes the subject from its context and reframes it in the present as a video, photograph, sculpture. This methodology immortalizes the subject or event, allowing each one to live on beyond its reality.
Motionless scenes are often characteristic of the artworks presented. The absence of activity becomes a marker, the stillness a pause. The aftermath of human activity is portrayed through the detritus left behind, and this anchor to civilization enables the projection of oneself in to the spaces presented. Points of drama are constructed so that their potential can be imagined and explored by the audience in isolation.
In the videos, actors are sometimes used to depict apparitions within the otherwise empty scenes portrayed. Characters interrupt the silence with specific behaviour, imagined or replayed in response to research gathered. Communicating concepts that exist outside of the frame, or animating the scene and its peculiarities, the personas developed become imprisoned within a temporal environment.
An interdisciplinary approach to making provides a multifaceted approach to communicating ideas. Videos are animated, existing repeatedly in the present. A photograph archives or traps a moment out of time for consideration. Sculptural works confirm traces of the past using found or cast objects. Through these selected media, aspects of place, archive and memory in relation to inhabited landscapes are examined.
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