Carole Luby - Exsertus Exchange
Monday 19th March to Wednesday 4th April
Photo credit: Matthew Cowan
To be asked to feed someone with a spoon is to be asked to participate in a deliberately challenging and uncomfortable act. It asks you to interact with another person in a very intimate way. The performer does not lift her arms, only touching the spoon with her mouth. It is as if feeding a child or someone of extreme old age, when they are unable to physically to feed themselves. In this act, each participant is asked to confront the helplessness in another human.
The Polynesian spiritual concept of tapu governs many aspects of sacred and everyday life, in particular food its consumption. In some situations designated members of society, as sacred practicitioners are unable to feed themselves because they are in a state of absolute tapu, and to touch the food itself would represent a transgression of their tapu state. They have to be fed in a special way, so as not to contaminate the food by touching it themselves. It elevates the status of the food itself as a sacred object.
The atmosphere in the performance space here too is one of a sacred realm, with sheets of paper containing fragments of writing - spanning a large central circle in the middle of the space. These pieces of writing are not literal or concise but hint at the elements of the performance in which they are a part of. Some contain text from Carole’s weblog, a parallel ingredient to the performance. The words describe her time, removed from everyday life, in the space as being a kind of retreat, drawing from the monastic traditions of solitude and contemplation, but with a focus on hunger. Arranged in the circular shape they map a well-trodden path over the course of the residency.
Matthew Cowan
The Polynesian spiritual concept of tapu governs many aspects of sacred and everyday life, in particular food its consumption. In some situations designated members of society, as sacred practicitioners are unable to feed themselves because they are in a state of absolute tapu, and to touch the food itself would represent a transgression of their tapu state. They have to be fed in a special way, so as not to contaminate the food by touching it themselves. It elevates the status of the food itself as a sacred object.
The atmosphere in the performance space here too is one of a sacred realm, with sheets of paper containing fragments of writing - spanning a large central circle in the middle of the space. These pieces of writing are not literal or concise but hint at the elements of the performance in which they are a part of. Some contain text from Carole’s weblog, a parallel ingredient to the performance. The words describe her time, removed from everyday life, in the space as being a kind of retreat, drawing from the monastic traditions of solitude and contemplation, but with a focus on hunger. Arranged in the circular shape they map a well-trodden path over the course of the residency.
Matthew Cowan
“I am going; I’m going away; I’ll be away for a few days, away for some time; I’m going away from everyday life; there will be a time for you to visit if you wish. I invite you to visit I invite you to visit me if you wish I invite you to visit me in my place my place away you can come visit me if you wish.”
Carole Luby
Photo credit: Conor Lawless
Set in the Novellus Castellum gallery space Exertus, Matt Fleming fills the space with old cameras, projectors, monitors, he creates a sort-of-ghost-like landscape of stuff. The sputtering, whirring almost attic like detritus might remind you of the unravelled psyche of some obsessive and unworldly geek but its much more than this. Memories of childhood peep out against the broken, static hiss of a deranged television studio camera, while a slide-projector ‘ca-chunks’ violently somewhere in a dimly lit corner.
On an entrance wall are records of Matt Fleming’s ideas on the installation. It alludes to notions of Irony and melancholy. Melancholia can often be read as a metaphor for the mind's collapse. This is where Fleming toy’s with us as his experiments, his machines collapse and spit their parts out at us. His machines are challenging us, mocking us and prodding us to find a meaning in something that is, associated with the twee, the post-adolescent and the nerdy. Its Tinguelyesque art brut mixed with a subtle pinch of Takahashi spice topped with Gondrylike garnish for the digital age all finished off with a rye smile. You could mistake this for real chaos, and the yet the post-modern ethos of chaos is seen as no longer original. Fleming’s success is that the layout of the space functions very much like a Dutch still life. Hence the originality lies within deciphering the externally and internally complex language and the organised chaos of this machine-like landscape laden rich in its jokes, puns and wise cracks all cleverly hidden and sub-verted for our pleasure.
Richard A. Phipps
Mat Fleming presented a series of experiments in 35mm film, 16mm film and video, which developed through his residency at the Exsertus project space. A cacophony of machines and films, amongst other things, attempt to deconstruct the process of translating 35mm photography into film; reverse engineer the pixel; and reveal the sculptural mechanics of the process.
Ele Carpenter
“The aim of the show is to create something of beauty. I think beauty is truth, keeping in mind 3 things: that one shouldn't take oneself too seriously, that truth is stranger than fiction and that something should be true to its own trickery. Like Godard said: cinema is "reality 24 times a second".
My show of work produced experimentally over the last month hopefully embraces that contradiction and my own limitations working like an artisan in an industrial medium.
I am hopefully turning failed science into good art and presenting new entertaining film installations in progress.”
Mat Fleming
[Collaboration on 35mm film with Chris Bate]
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