Here There and the self

On Monday, September 8, 2008 Boyden Gallery hosted the opening of Patrick Kelley’s exhibition of his recent work. The show, titled Here There, consisted mainly of extended panoramic images and words.
Kelley began his lecture by sharing his artistic history which led up to the current work. Mostly, he discussed the history of text and words in his work. I found this quite interesting because over the summer I became almost obsessed with the context, concentration on, visual differences, and subtleties of text and have been trying to figure out a way to work this fascination into my work. Kelley’s use of indexical words, especially in the work with “multiple heres” interested me because indexical words are seemingly unloaded of feeling and emotion and could serve as an adequate vehicle for examining the characteristics of text described above.

I also was interested by Kelley’s ideas about the audience’s completion of narratives that Kelley set up. My work often has a narrative quality because of the inclusion of people (often the same people repeatedly) in my work. Kelley’s use of words to complete his narratives may be an avenue I’d like to explore.
Kelley has created flip books throughout his career. Last year I tried my hand at making flip books and while it was extremely difficult I enjoyed the process and delighted in the final product for many of the same reasons Kelley did: the intimacy of such a small object, the interactivity and physicality of having a little book in your hand, and the turn over of control to the audience. I’m thinking that maybe I should consider my draw to these qualities when thinking about the output for my photography. While printing larger is something I see value in, maybe I should also try printing much smaller and continuing to make photobooks.

An additional aspect of Kelley’s talk that resonated with me was his discussion of how some of his works aim to “externalize an internal image in the mind.” I am not sure, but I think that this may be deeply related to my ideas about actually versus perceived memory.

Another topic that Kelley discussed was how the “failure” of his original idea produced the works in the show. I think that the tension created between him having complete control over his tool, Maya, and producing a “failure” is an interesting one that resonates in my work as well. Over the summer I created some works that were out of focus, blurred, or dark, qualities of works that I would normally consider failures because I did not have complete control over my tool. The works, however, shocked me. I liked them; other people liked them. I think that maybe I need to define failure more clearly for myself and separate other qualities from it that get lumped to this idea of “failure” simply because they have typically negative connotations.

-Anne