Saturday, July 16, 2022

Residency 4, Day 25: 'My work, at its core, is about managing the vulnerability, awkwardness and discomfort of being alive. ' - Kara Hearn

Well, that was a busy day. As luck would have it in the final few days before this residency ends, the latest show at Uillinn was taken down, and a new one is not going up until Monday, so I was able to try out the galleries and spaces, and bring in battery-powered wind turbines, inflatable large ones, the 12ft (3.66m) high print I have just had made (in three sections) and more.

It occurred to me that the large print which is a photo of a packaged wind turbine toy (see https://www.instagram.com/p/CgEaOMtMH4a/), the packaged wind turbine toy itself (https://www.mocksim.org/works/making-wind.htm), and a stamp sized version produced for that ABC project (https://www.mocksim.org/works/dutch-stamp.htm) would work well together as a triptych.

The idea got me thinking of the famous scene from Father Ted when Ted is trying to explain the basics of perspective to Dougal: https://youtu.be/MMiKyfd6hA0. Ted uses the example of real cows which are far away by comparison with a small toy cow which is close. Interestingly there are cows in the toy image too and the large one was produced so that the head of the apparently closer beast would be correctly cow-sized. The wisdom of the series Father Ted was partly due to its perfect appropriateness for the moment in history it was produced in, but also in other ways. So, for example, with photography, video, TV and cinema, human propensities are exploited via the tricks of perspective. It is easy to believe that certain figures represented may be far away, and others close, but screens and prints are two dimensional, flat items. Representations on the picture plane are all the same distance from the eye. So in that sense the majority are stupid and Dougal's puzzlement opens avenues to important overlooked truths. Off you go now to read Panofsky's Perspective as Symbolic Formshorturl.at/eoR24.

The great Kara Hearn appeared today at Uillinn with her family, the intrepid Bill and thoughtful Walter, all the way from New York. It was very pleasing to get together face-to-face, having had to collaborate remotely back in January and February: https://www.instagram.com/p/CZ7nwHcsOIL/.

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