Paintings and Drawings: Mai 2012

One of my first works at Edinburgh College of Art was part of an exchange Project to a partnerinstitute in Boston. Each third year student made a box, 5 x 8inches, to be send and exhibited at the Art School in Boston and each student in Boston made one for Edinburgh. The project readopts the idea of the Fluxus boxes, that are ment to be send or taken to other places, so they obviously cotradict the idea of putting artwork on a wall in a gellery or museum.

The range of how the Fluxus artists used this small scale stage is quite versatile. Many of these boxes have things inside that invite to take them out, look and play with them, wheather prints, drawings, games or found objects etc. Sometimes it has been reputed 'banal' things, that has been staged on the purpose to be seen and not beeing banalised.

I quite liked the idea of using found objects or images and I started to collect and tried several things out. I thought about Marcel Duchamps Ready-Mades and his proclamation, that the choice of things is already an artistic act. I also thought about the box as a special frame or stage and that framing and placing found things gives them a certain importance as well as it shows that a choice is beeing made.

Using this particular photograph for my box was more a coincidence. I found it next to other fotographs and postcards in an antique shop in Edinburgh. I sticked it on my studio wall and looked at it from time to time.

As I was doing research in a Fluxus book, I found this paper with a small circle shaped hole and I started playing with it and observing things through it like with a camera lens. Through this particular view I was able to look at parts in the photo that I was interested in while masking the other parts.

I found a certain odness in the image, and a ceratin atmosphere which has been pushed by the photo becoming slightly yellow in parts. But this was not very obvious for me as I saw this photo for the first time. Looking through the circle I found this part where I got really interested in and where this particular oddness and atmosphere seemed to be concentrated. The image startet to look more and more unreal and I recognised, that there are no people in there, as well as certain parts - the paths and the roof of the house for example - looked very clear as if this photo was taken from a model instead of a real villige, which is again in contrast to the atmosperic mood.So as soon as I picked one part and masked the other I started to observe it more and more. The fascination for it came more through a constant observation and the view through my 'paperlens'.

For me, it became quite important not only to share what I observed in the image but also my reflections about the frame which it put somewhere by choice.