Midden - a quotidian dig

midden

Midden explores our heavily saturated world of images, things and

signs through imagined artifacts of an archaeological dig.

Opening 5pm, Saturday, 25th June

Artist talk Tuesday, 5.30pm, 28th June

Showing from Monday 27th June - Saturday 2nd July 2011

Opening hours Monday - Friday 10.30am - 5pm

Saturday 10am - 1pm and by appointment

Introduction

"Midden (a quotidian dig) is one of a series of three inter-related projects developed and exhibited over the past 5 years. The three projects involve interpretations of archival systems, mapping and material re-use. These subjects and materials are explored through archaeological frameworks and in some instances community participation.

In this third project I appropriated the use of jigsaw pieces (essentially readymade bits of colour and information) to construct stratifications of texture and form into an imagined archaeological dig(s). Overlapping and layering material is deployed to evoke a sense of things being hidden while incomplete forms suggest a state of evolving.

Ideas of the midden as a archive of information that may shift and change relate to Haroum and the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie (1990) in which Haroum describes an ocean of stories where all stories are created and stored - in this space the stories flow and mingle and have the capacity to shift and change. Here I find adjacencies in this potential to geological material moving and altering through strata and the malleability of information technologies.

In the later, the effect of watching streams of visual data coming into and out of focus onscreen through Google Earth, has informed Midden’s aesthetic. Some objects emerge from the pattern of pieces while others distort and merge into the coral-like accretions as wall puzzles rupture into bouquets of pixellated patterns and supernovas."

Ana Terry