Apartment is delighted to present ‘Mount Purgatory’, a show by Maeve Rendle. The work is a culmination of a twelve month residency with Apartment and made during a week in residence at Apartment. Mount Purgatory looks at ways in which art works come into being and take on life through the process of being created. The work is concerned with the nature of artistic practice, and of the domestic artist run space. It looks at how the artist run space and the art on display act with and against each other to produce a rich and varied dialogue.
The image above a detail of the photographs in the space which reveal the entire contents of Apartment placed in the living room. The artist gives herself the challenge of completing a task. The process of under taking this task creates a fresh environment in which to think. It is in this thinking environment that the work begins to emerge to the artist. It is as though the work has its own intrinsic life and it becomes the artist’s job to uncover that life, to reveal that work of art, rather than to enable a pre conceived idea to be made real. In this respect the artist responds directly to her immediate physical environment using the materials and tools with which it provides her.
The first step was to remove every object, shelf, utensil, item of furniture etc from its original position within Apartment and place it in the living room. Taking the living room to be the main space of the ‘Gallery’, all the contents of Apartment were placed together to create a new surface with which the artist could work. The artist explores the thinking process and relationship that develops between the artist and the work, before during and after the work is made.
Above ; image of the emptied flat. The final work presented for exhibition is a sequence of photographs taken over the period of time the artist was in residence. The photographs record the contents gathering in the living room; amidst the contents there is a growing pile of newspapers. The artist’s movements are traced through the viewfinder of the camera, and her presence is recorded only through a sentence repeatedly highlighted in every newspaper, ‘this morning there was no new idea’.
The process of finding the work from within the contents of Apartment correlates to finding words within existing newsprint accessible to all. Being able to find the same words each day in every newspaper, demonstrates that nothing is finite; similarly the work with the contents of Apartment will not come to an end but can be repeated with an ever-changing shape. Thus the present work of art is it’s demonstration of the potential for the work to change and morph into a new work, and that work into another work and so on.
The Installation of the photographs
special open weekend
Friday 9th March - Sunday 11th March
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