Factory wall

Suess, Eleanor [Artist] (2018) Factory wall. 40° Celsius. .

Official URL: https://eleanorsuess.works/practice/installation/f...

Abstract

This moving image installation utilises the fragments of individual moving image sequences all filmed from the same source, over various periods of time, to engage the viewer in ideas of representation, of space and place, and past, present and future. For this exhibition, which served as a launch event for a new studio complex, I recorded footage of the factory wall opposite my studio (within that same complex), commencing on the day the studios opened. This view, and the light both it and the studio received throughout the day, were significant factors in my selection of the studio – capturing this continually changing condition through digital video recordings allow for an exploration of the experience of dwelling in adjacency to this view. Although this larger project is still ongoing, the work produced for this exhibition explored how the physical structure of an installation utilising the footage recorded so far can provide a kinaesthetic form of viewer engagement through “a kind of learning not with the mind alone, but with the body itself… to explore physically more than one tense – reference to the past and future can coexist with the present” {Morse, 1990 #371@158, 159}. Displaying time-lapse recordings, analogue box monitors, themselves artefacts of a now historical mode of moving image presentation, evoke a past tense though their physical qualities and the imagery displayed on their low resolution cathode ray tube screens. A contemporary digital projector turned a wall into a large screen (but, in contrast to the box monitors, one with no material presence of its own), displaying real-time pre-recorded footage which itself used the projection of sunlight through the studio’s corner windows, capturing the actions of the studio’s inhabitants, to produce a form of shadow performance on the factory wall. During the exhibition’s private view, children used the beam of projector light to create new shadow performance on the gallery wall. Adding to the pre-recorded imagery, one monitor displayed a continuous live-stream from the studio window. Despite the physical proximity of studio to gallery (itself an important aspect of the work) the live stream first travelled in a material-less form to the internet before coming back down to inhabit the mass of the monitor. Representations of time, as well as space, are at the core of this work. The visitor, though their perceptual agency and bodily inhabitation constructs a version of the view of the factory wall, navigating between the screens, the different time frames and time scales. In my own performance as artist installing the work, I repeatedly travelled backward and forward from studio to gallery, transporting equipment and tools, moving between the real space of the studio and its view fo the factory wall, to the re-constructed version of that view within the room of the gallery. If the installation was itself situated in the present, I am now located in its future, inhabiting the studio still, seeing that view continue to change.