It’s in the shopping arcade under The Capitol on Swanston St (or if you prefer walking the laneways, head straight to 10 Presgrave Place). I will be there during reasonable waking hours, 31 Oct - 6 Nov 2022, but you’ll be able to see some good frames 24/7.
Framing night Wednesday,
November 2, at 6 pm.
An open artist's studio
A pop-up framing boutique
A participatory situation
A public space for private experiences
A site-responsive blahblahblah
A heavily overframed undertaking
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The intimacy of the artist’s process, publicly exposed. A precious sculpture cut open. A graffiti epos brought indoors. That evasive boundary between private and public traced, tweaked and reframed.
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The art frame is just another boundary, presupposing art on one side and non-art on the other. But where is that frame in sculpture? In sound art? In a participatory situation? In aesthetic experience at large? What frames what? Who frames what? What frames whom? Does it matter? Is art to life what private is to public? Or the other way round? What happens when art and life cannot be told apart? Can blurred boundaries be productive of new meanings?
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I will start by reframing a partially unarted sculpture by Martin George. I am not sure how. I don’t even know what that means. Maybe nothing yet. Please join me in an open-ended exploration!
Generously supported by
Select framings
Framing the space and encounter
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I aimed to set up an open studio to experiment with material framing ideas, hoping for invigorating input from passers-by. However, a fitting space offer came from INFRA/STRUCTURE curator, who advertised my intervention as an exhibition, inadvertently triggering me to include some elements more pertinent to a show than a studio – a few resolved works, an opening event etc. The venue being a former shop, added yet another layer of framing, prompting the show title ("De-elegance Framers") and promotional materials ("We frame everything but pictures") to echo the remaining shop sign ("Boutique de Elegance"). By lucky coincidence, one of the two entrances was from the street-art-saturated Presgrave Place, where many works are presented in picture frames. All these framings converged towards an ambiguous studio-exhibition-workshop setup whose boundaries were interpreted differently by different people. E.g., some visitors assumed that the street art outside was all mine, while street-artist-led tours decisively ignored their groups' interest in my shop, although some other guides were curious enough to enter and engage.
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I kept reframing the space every day, sometimes rendering it as a pure art installation, sometimes as a messy studio, a lounge or a storage room – each configuration provoking a different mode of engagement. Tidy arrangements inhibited the play. Messiness was often read as the place being closed. The challenge was to strike the right balance that would pull the passers-by in without triggering "don't touch the art" conditioning.
My favourite conceptual gesture was framing the space by sculpture for the opening night - a big piece of sculpture was placed in each doorway, forcing any visitor to step over art to come in. At the same time, each piece of sculpture was "door-framed". Inversion of the relationships - being invited but facing an obstacle, an ephemeral "art institution" demarcated by art rather than the other way round, created interesting tensions and uncertainties to be negotiated.
Framing the sculpture
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My original intent was to use the framing corners and glass frames that the frame fairy had dropped at my studio during my earlier explorations. I wanted to use them to try and frame a sculpture. I did not know what that might mean or where it might lead me, but I wanted to try and address a silly question by doing rather than thinking.
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The sculpture I’ve been working with is a monumental modernist piece generously offered by Martin George. I have engaged with it to explore the idea of “unarting”. If my ordinary practice turns fragments of the everyday into art by framing, could I reverse the process and unframe a piece of art back into everyday? I am not too interested in “succeeding” (melting down the aluminium sculpture would get the work done quite easily) as in what insights and impulses might arise while trying to undo its framing – whatever it may be.
Sculpture deals with space. It sort of frames itself by materially delimiting the space it occupies. Yet it is often supported by additional framing devices – a pedestal, a gallery room, a sculpture park, a sculpture-responsive landscaping, a label. Earlier in the process, I cut the sculpture in half to fit within the applicable OHS framing. This gesture immediately created two ambiguities: 1) is it still a sculpture but with a more flexible spatial configuration, or are there two sculptures now? And 2) with the sculptural hollow insides exposed to some extent – are those insides still part of the sculpture, or do they now fall outside of the frame, shrunken to the volume of the aluminium sheet itself? What, then, about me covering one half of the sculpture in framing corners? My addition, while following the outer contour of the object, created a distinctly different silhouette and surface, rendering a piece with a sense of integrity of its own. Have I unarted the original work by “re-arting” it into something else? To further confuse myself, I kept rearranging it in different configurations that occasionally included pieces of furniture, loose framing corners and other objects, offering multiple options for drawing the boundary “where the sculpture ends” and leaving the decision to the viewer.
Framing the narrative
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Many visitors enthusiastically responded to my invitation to frame something or someone in the room by something or someone else – preferably in an unorthodox way. On some occasions, interaction with materials served as a vehicle for a very personal narrative. In other cases, it was an exploration of the form or a conceptual response to my provocation. I feel inspired, humbled and grateful for all these wonderful contributions!
Framing the sound / by sound
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For the opening night, I have attached contact mics to one half of the hollow aluminium sculpture. After a bit of processing to ensure that the contents of the conversations and identities of the voices were not perceptible, I played the recording back into the room through exciters attached to the same sculpture for the rest of the show.
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An eavesdropping sculpture was spilling the beans back into the room. The concept amused and excited the visitors. It was also my impression that the buzz of indistinguishable voices in the background facilitated new conversations – one did not have “to break the silence”.
Sound framed sculpture, the sculpture framed sound, sound framed the encounter.
Framing the glasses / by glasses
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Eyeglasses turned out to be a big challenge to un/re-frame. No matter how crazy arrangements I attempted, the result was always screaming “optometrist”. A closer exploration of how to unframe this iconic variety of frames may be worthwhile to undertake in the future.
Framing by colour
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The pre-existing lighting in the space was a bad fit for my setup. Lights on would kill the video projections and the ambience, and lights off would make the room feel “closed”. A spontaneous purchase of an RGB LED spotlight to remedy the problem opened up an unforeseen line of enquiry. Framing by light and colour was inherently non-restrictive – it did not define the boundary but drew attention to something. It framed things while inverting the idea of the frame as a container.
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More of those - on the "Framing proceedings on-site" page.
