HERBERT READ GALLERY
March - April 2006
Single screen projection with 8 diptychs and decoupage, vitrines with Deadad Bookworks, 2 inflatable sculptures that inflated and deflated intermittently and framed hand-written list of all inflations.
The First Component Part of the Exhibition came about through the chance discovery of some of my Deadad’s glamour magazines. They worked as a powerful mnemonic and catapulted me back with Time’s Arrow to when I first found them as a young boy in his wardrobe. They evoked brilliant memories of Narnia and my first sexual awakenings along with a vivid yearning to join in.
There are eight ‘works’ in all and they are presented in pairs or as Digital Diptychs. Through the use of image manipulation technologies I have realised my childhood fantasies and quite literally entered the televisual frame whilst alongside a ‘still’ Decoupage (three-dimensional ‘layered’ image), shows a traditionally hand crafted picture.
The Second Component Part of the Exhibition consists of two large inflatable sculptures, one is of my Deadad and the other is of my Deadad’s Deadad (my Grandad). They have been filmed at various locations around the world, which have significance to either their lives or mine. This I am calling an Inflation Installation.
The Third Component Part of the Exhibition is a Bookwork. It has been generated through an Invitation to Write that I sent out to 65 (one for each year of his life), artists, writers, filmmakers, friends, family and those I had never met. They were encouraged to dwell upon four photographs of my Deadad, including one of his dead body laid out in the chapel of rest. I was attempting to glean a more objective insight into who-what my Deadad might have been. I then used some of the replies as an inspiration for my own contemplations on his-my life and death. The book also expands on some of the ideas behind the Digital Diptychs and the Inflation Installation.
A list of those invited :
Ken Arnold Paul Auster Clio Barnard Mark Bourne Dave Calhoun Dinos Chapman John Cheetham Adam Chodzko Matthew Collings Michael Copeman Ben Cook Laurence Coriat Mark Cousins Alex Crombie Rodgers Chris Darke Alnoor Dewshi Sian Ede Gareth Evans Robert Farrar Jem Finer Lizzie Francke John Gange Nick Gordon Smith Tony Grisoni Nicky Hamlyn John Hardwick Garry Henderson Susan Hiller Ben Hopkins Barry Isaacson Nick James Mike Jay Christy Johnson Emma Kay Conor Kelly Simon Lebe James Lever Janna Levin Joanna Lowry Sean Lock Jacqueline Lucas Jackie McCannon Andrew Mitchell Judith Palmer John Penfold Mark Peranson Sophia Phoca Vito Rocco Jonathan Romney John Roseveare Howard Schuman Nat Segnit Kerri Sharp Iain Sinclair Kiki Smith Frank Stanton Dudley Sutton Heilco Van der Ploeug Dan Weldon Fay Weldon Richard Wentworth Ian White Louise K Wilson Janni Visman Ben Woolford
Andrew Kotting
2006
The prime organising structure of this project is around the
conceit of the trinity, most obviously Kötting, his deadad and his
deadad’s deadad. Such a numerical ordering is not essentially religious,
although it is worth noting that the father, son and holy ghost (here,
perhaps memory, a collective sense of the deceased) of ‘In the Wake of a
Deadad’ are not so far in their ambiguous relations from the more
widely known grouping.
The trinities here, however, continue, from the material manifestations – filmed inflations, pornographic decoupages and writings – to the intellectual triangulations. ‘In the Wake of a Deadad’ is built around the tangled relationship between place, the body and what we might call (aesthetic) re-memory, the public incarnation of memory in an artefact. Similarly, the sense of sitings (sightings), the body as a zone in its own right, the positioning of that body (whether Kötting’s or his inflated relatives) in a landscape or environment and the final placing of the resultant work, in the gallery or simply public consciousness by any means, serve further to underline how the triangulation of emotion generated by the material is encoded directly into the means of its representation.
Gareth Evans