AN OFFICE FOYER IN WINTER
A.M. Hanson
UCA degree show 2013
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“..I looked into office spaces, again and again I saw plants, their shadows, projected through the windows that fed and shelter shielded them.
…eventually, they began to return a gaze, in the daytime and at night, caught in myriad motion of montaged, dirt splattered, stained glass corporate frontages.
In seasonal gloom and in many false springs – evergreens radiated, in eternal city light, like repeat emerging, miniature winter gardens. A photo verve.”
photo installation
photo brochure
desktop/laptop video
I came away to be away, to get connected again to myself and others, to form new ideas, to make new work.
This happened. This is now. A (photo) bubble has been burst. A new photo form has began.
On return visits from the university studios back home to the Euston Road, with new thought processes, awarenesses and in new light, my eyes were opened up by things that had always been around me.
First, forms emerged. Through opaqued glass office frontages, back lit at night, (material that has been shown here previously, ongoing, evolving too) – objects appeared, distilled and diluted still life whispers of themselves.
A computer monitor became an alien-esque vibration of itself, an evian water bottle, glowed it’s muted colour contour branding. A stack of CDs, a ridged landscape in the mist of passing witness.
And plants. Lit day and night in the gloom of a long winter. Office plants, palms mainly, again and again I kept seeing them.
Illuminated and blocked out in artificial atmospheres that proposed a hyper real globalistic repeated condition of contact.
I photographed and filmed them easily and enjoyably, near to me. But understood their presence and pretend naturalism, their silhouette, was everywhere.
In awareness of past and present experience and research, knowledge of their media, art, ad, commercial, escapist, eco, humanistic globalistic streamed message flow.
They are everywhere in the corporate collage of the city, in it’s off shoots. Like miniature winter gardens blocked out around every metro-corner.
Ready made specimens in ready made installations.
Living archival connections to their ‘natural’ lineage, linked. Totems of tokenistic hope. Shadows of the jungle. Exotica piercing venetian blinds, pressed against the barrier window projections of the street’s myriad motion.
From the outside looking in, I saw them patterned in reflected fanfare. Light layered across light towards light.
A Photo Verve.
I place these photo/video/display documental fragments in a post contemporary framework.
That is to say, in selection, editing, and variants of re-presentation and communication – the plants, as evergreen motif in many a false spring, set in their other worldly (yet, lit now-ness) hot houses, are gestured towards (returned to) the people and places in which they were first registered and re-formed as objects of desire and actuality.
Literally as photo plants, curling and unfurling as temperature changes, this hanging garden of multi-corp-international stained glass, projects itself back and forth.
In the atrium space, they hang elongated, reaching out from their Plato’s cave of shadowy want, in turn shadowed by the travelling framework of the giant light box against which they transmit a temporal performative turn.
A turn to light. A shadow is cast, as the sun mutes or blasts open a colour formation.
Globe lights actual and photo echoed, act as new planets and eclipse moons, to their growth, the sap rising and fading and flickering back on again.
In publishing their conditions and contexts, a photo series is presented as a brochure-like registry. The plants as advertisements for themselves. Within and beyond their constantly counterpointed placement.
On film, we see a plant looking for another. This is a love story, set in an anti-void of the sharpness of the city’s flux. A plant both at home and lost and found in these workplace spaces.
To highlight their ‘forgotten-ness’, to re claim a new non-territorial posture, an everyday beauty in form and formations of features.
A video on a monitor, on a desk on an aerial walkway, next to a drinks machine / rubber plant. Sit and absorb, or pass by repeatedly and glimpse particles of moment.
The photos, plants (in places) clipped up to dry, to be re born.
A looser leaf in a more purposeful place.
For me, a return to light, colour and contact.
A.M. Hanson
direct contact: [email protected]
past/present/future info:
www.alexcalledsimonprojects.com
AN OFFICE PLANT IN WINTER (video / 4’58)
watch > http://bit.ly/YM7KZ3
