| Mireille Astore | ||
Honourable Fears |
Photomedia Installation
Exhibition - 27 August - 10 September 2003 groundfloorgallery 39 Cameron Street, Balmain, NSW, Australia
| Jean Baudrillard |
Honourable Fears is a photographic installation which explores the absences and spaces that are occupied by the forbidden, the unspeakable, and the Other. The installation is a bold attempt at deciphering the social psyche and an invitation to question notions of self-protection as they manifest themselves through the continuum of history.
Appearing in fragments, sublime armories travel and arrive into our time charged
with nobility and futility. The subsequent yearning and nostalgic references
are then symbolised through the flight of objects submerged in an intense black
void. The fossilising of disposable medical devices through photography is a
euphoric attempt to return to the world the absent memory of the ephemeral while
disembodiment and historical signifiers, such as swords and protective clothing
engage in an amorphous aesthetic and philosophical play.
Through this body of work, a question is also asked about the absolute and the
eternal. The notions of consumption and the hyper-real are examined in a bid
to understand how these phenomena may have transformed death into an image-based
commodity. Death seeps into our lives on a daily basis through media packages
and sanitised distances. And so, through the still presence of a photograph,
the ancient and the archaic are encapsulated so as to provide grief with a space
to breathe. The enigmatic return of the Other through an Arab death is both
sorrowful and abject, and so the image creates a sense of enquiry into the self
and into long held views… or, perhaps, just a pause.
The viewer is also invited to extricate the power of language and to signify
consumerist tools through disposable art items such as giveaway cards. These
contain images from the installation and text from the public relations unit
of the “US Army Medical Research and Materiel Command” and, like morsels
of a wedding cake, they intend to offer a taste of an optimistic and serene
future….
| Mireille Astore |