To coincide with Camberwell Arts week (17th-21st June 2012) Inland inviting artists to respond to a temporary exhibition space within its gallery walls.
The structure built within the usual gallery space acted as a scaled down interpretation of the gallery in which to consider projects in a similarly pared down & yet climatic manner.
The initial departure point for making the structure revolved around the idea of an Island as a testing ground for experimentation & discovery. At this stage we imagined a structure that had the potential to act as a platform for autonomous works within the framework of a collaborative gesture.
As this idea developed we designed the structure so that it is relative to the spatial plan of the Inland gallery. By being self-reflexive in this way, we hoped to free up an association with finished works & encourage a more organic production of work within this short time frame.
The design of the structure refers to the history & use of the narrative construct a mise en abyme. Whereby an idea (often a symbolic image) is placed within the larger context of a greater idea to imply further meaning of the whole.
The structure built within the usual gallery space acted as a scaled down interpretation of the gallery in which to consider projects in a similarly pared down & yet climatic manner.
The initial departure point for making the structure revolved around the idea of an Island as a testing ground for experimentation & discovery. At this stage we imagined a structure that had the potential to act as a platform for autonomous works within the framework of a collaborative gesture.
As this idea developed we designed the structure so that it is relative to the spatial plan of the Inland gallery. By being self-reflexive in this way, we hoped to free up an association with finished works & encourage a more organic production of work within this short time frame.
The design of the structure refers to the history & use of the narrative construct a mise en abyme. Whereby an idea (often a symbolic image) is placed within the larger context of a greater idea to imply further meaning of the whole.
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SUNDAY 17th
Rebecca James James’ work for InInland responded to her time spent working on a building site in Finland. She recreated the lunch hut used by the construction workers who were building a large house in a suburb of Helsinki. Using the InInland structure as the basis for the installation she added flooring, walls, fabric from the hut and the mise en abyme, photographs of the interior of the original hut. Paul Kindersley Kindersley treated the space as a stage, an impromptu lo-fi television studio. Lights. Camera. Action. In the style of a workout video or shopping channel exclusive he coordinated colour and movement to pose, posture and sell before uploaded onto youtube and continuing life on the internet. Posing will replace walking. Pouting will replace talking. Slo Mo workout is a full time job. You dont even need a camera to be on TV... 
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TUESDAY 19th
Cilla Berg Berg worked in response to the scale & the potential for InInlands structure to adopt a new representation. As an attempt to re-interpret the shape of the structure Cilla projected images of the structure onto itself in different states and sizes. Jennifer Campbell Campbell treated InInland as a platter to arrange home-made rocks and shrubs on. She indulged in the slutty show-off nature of garnished French food, the over-the-top significance of pebbles in a Japanese zen-garden or the plastic gems arranged in an expensive fish tank. The result suggested something more than the sum of its parts, which regards it-self as having a similar resonance to that of objects in a dream or a painting. Benji Jeffrey Five artists work together to produce a self-referring work and within this five actors play five artists working together to produce a self-referring work and within this five actors play five artists working together to produce a self-referring work and within this five actors play five artists working together to produce a self-referring work and within this five actors play five artists working together to produce a self-referring work and within this five actors play five artists working together to produce a self-referring work and within this five actors play five artists working together to produce a self-referring work and within this five actors play five artists working... 
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THURSDAY 21st
Natasha Cox Cox transformed the structure into a pinhole camera, a blacked out box that records the very space it attempts to mirror. This mise en abyme is extended further but also turned in on itself, a mobius strip. Images made record movement but absorb stillness, questioning the relationships between the image, structure and the space surrounding them. Keira Greene “Incidental Enterprise” Greene produced a diary imagining the InInland structure as an iconic public sculpture, experienced over the three day event. This documentation was presented on the third day as a fictional account adopting multiple narrative perspectives. The resulting work forged a sentimental relationship with the structure and its possible history by expanding upon its temporal existence. Jennifer Crouch Crouch presented a talk to explore the question of how we come to know an object and how we define it. Crouch compared the autonomy of art and the autonomy of science, in addition to ideas in literature that concern methods and actions of; deductivism, empiricism, indeterminism and pragmatism. She feels that these all serve to throughly confuse as well as embellish interesting questions about our relations to objects (affinities, estrangements, personification and needs) Lauren Houlton Through seeing the evolving structure of InInland as a single completed finished work: a collection of different happenings, performances, and time based artworks that together produce results not obtainable by any of the elements alone, Houlton constructed a library housing source material of all the artists who contributed throughout the three day exhibition. Housed together alongside remains of what came before, relationships were explored, word and object interacted, deconstructing the sum of parts that create a holistic whole. This was housed alongside a changing floor painting, created from geometric layers added each night. Sophie Nibbs Nibbs gave a talk focusing on the construction of the Olympic city in Stratford. The building of a city within a city is an example of mise en abyme in perhaps its most apparent form. In constructing a space designed to embody all that is positive and aspirational about the host city, portrayed through visual means to the rest of the world, a hollow, polarised reflection is created. Rosie Carr Carr made a black and white 16mm film in the space, documenting and re-interpreting the actions of the other artists and art works as well as the processes and interactions that occured there. Using the Inland dark room the film was processed and displayed within the space. Using field recordings from the event a digital soundtrack accompanied the short film which created an abstract and investigative artwork. |
