Roman Ondak Retrospective, 2005
This is a series of 50 wall labels bearing the titles of Ondak’s 50 former works.
(I can’t remember what the titles were and I can’t find them online, if anyone knows this work please let me know…..)
This was the only artist that I liked at the Sunday Art Show, I’ve never seen his work before so it was an exciting discovery. The Gallery gb agency who show his work say
“He imbues his drawings, installations, environments, photos and performances with social stratifications in addition to conceptual ones. Each piece is another step in an evolving process he develops and stimulates. Using a real fact, a place, a trip, or an experience as a starting point, Roman Ondak informally presents a fiction of his own making, full of repetitions. He sets the scene and the subject, and different filters skew the infinite replay of each story. Memory holds a critical place in his work since it implies experience, the past and its meaning, but also because it opens the way for imagination and the unconscious.
This work occurs at both the material and psychological edges of our perception. Every piece tests the limits of social and even museum space, with every artistic gesture insinuating itself into the every day. Reminiscence is the unifying thread that runs through every work. Ondak explores the particularity of exhibition space like a vast archaeological site whose elements he combines to help understand the reverberations of our perceptions in both space and time, whether intimate or as a group, be they rational or psychological.”
Another work I have seen online is Passage 2004. 500 chocolates were distributed to people with the request ‘to mould a sculpture out of the remained silver foil wrapping after eating a chocolate’
“Using a diverse media and methods, Roman Ondak explores in his installations, photographs, drawings, and performances a specific situation, which very often involve people he has some relationship with. These people either play a certain role in it or participate by creating of something what is based on Ondak’s descriptions. Inner structure of some of Ondak’s works is intentionally constructed in such way, that he expects people he personally doesn’t know to be partially motivated to take part in them.
That is also the case of his project conceived for CCA Project Gallery in which he collaborates with approximately five hundred employees of steel business in Kitakyushu. Without meeting them in persona, and only through another collaborators which have helped Ondak in distributing of his instruction to all of them, he is processually projecting his own perception and understanding of Japanese society into his work.
Each of his participants (the employee of steel business) was given a chocolate bar wrapped in its original silver foil wrapping with a simple request to mold a miniature sculpture from the silver foil after they would have eaten the chocolate. Sculptures made by all participants were then displayed in CCA Project Gallery.”
http://www.cca-kitakyushu.org/english/project/onda…
