Cascade Falls ( Installation photo's and Crit)

Photo credit © Yao-Lung Cheng 

   

      To begin with the layout of the exhibition, we decided to try to make these two artists - Lindsay, Yao-Lung's work presenting a jointed relation with engaging with the representation of memories.  The space C2 is a white cube space located inside of the college, it is a room composed by the white walls as a gallery space.  The blue curtain we hang onto the window create a new landscape within the space, which I suggest to input our ideology of curtain as the stage curtain - cover what is behind the scene, or a curtain within the domestic space such as home/ private space/ restaurant/ cars as kind of implication of private/ public, be seen/ and hided from.

      As a curator of this exhibition, I would like to second several ideas and knowledge of the definition of curation, thus to discuss the role as a curator, and then I would like to talk about the artists work within the   project.  "The curator is basically in this case acting as a kind of interface between artist, institution, and audience in "the development of critical meaning in partnership and discussion with artists and publics" as Barnaby Drabble states. which curator act as a mediator, administrator and manager locate themselves within Art World, which Alloway sited as "a shifting multiple goal coalition"and it can also be regarded as an organization "a negotiating environment." Some believe that a good curator should be invisible (Burnett 2005) but the under the circumstance, contemporary curating mostly concentrates on theories of curating and can be argued to do more for the reputation of individual curators or theorists than for the sharing of curatorial skills. (Graham&Cook 2010) The history of exhibitions is one of our most culturally 'repressed.' As Mary Anne Staniszewski stressed, the contextualisation of space and its rhetoric have been overshadowed by contexualising in terms of epochs and the artists' oeuvre, despite the fact that exhibition installations have had such a crucial significance for how meaning is created in Art." (2005, 91)
     
       The exhibition layout was inspired first by both artists' work and their idea, I wanted to build up a installation layout from their meaning and things that inspired them, which I second from Graham & Cook "We believe that a good understanding of the artwork - its behaviours, processes, and cultural context - is vital starting point for all curating. (2010, 11) Lindsay's work engaging with the recreation of the non-human/ inaccessible habitat for human which were being recreated, reproduced by human being inorder to fulfill it's curiosity or to achieve something that is impossible being experience immediately or has intangible factor within it, such as past memory.

     Yao-Lung's work has two key elements within it, he arranging collected objects within the frame, and this time he presents two type of frame.  He uses ice cube and physical frames as the boundaries of his objects, or his story.  The ice cube has a dramatic effect on this space also enact within the people who were inside of the space as well. Every melting moment were participated by audiences who physically engaging with the exhibition, and people can sense its dramatically effect visually through the melting water and psychologically by the pre-exist knowledge of the science of ice.  People founds his work within the ice is giving this idea of "not wanting the edge to be defined." "can't help thinking what's going to happen when it melt --- unpredictable anticipation" with the attention of not wanting the edge to be too defined, Yao-lung's collection evoked people's imagination by using objects with shared memory (a feature of consumerism), which we can see as Ilya Kavakov who was being described simultaneously a poet of facts and a spinner of tales, in his catalogue "The Man who never threw anything away", illustrate this action as "Conceived in ideological grandeur and built on the cheap, Communism's monument were ready-made ruins, encircled, as monuments always are, by the humbler architecture of ordinary life." Not necessarily related to communism but the notion of according the objects (Time shell)  one can travel meta-physically through their past by visually absorb these little collections with differed stories.

      Lindsay's work combines two framed pictures from an aquarium in Chicago, and men-made fountain.  The fountain has a geometric shape which I located it in the middle of the room, because when the water coming out of the water nozzle contains performativity can create a kind of stage central thus make viewers to focus and being aware of.  However, the water sprung out of the fountain edge became problematic and being considered as a failure. and one of the pictures were deliberately heighten above the eye level also frustrating viewer's visibility and so did the way we displayed Yao-lung's work evoked such question.  With the cheap material and artificial colour, Disneyland, beach coma... and something that is produced deliberately to entertain people and thus they pretend to be happy .  Other two pieces on the wall can help viewers to get involved with an experience.

     The water from my point of view is a very key issue within this exhibition, I imagine the melting water, and water which sprung from the nozzle together with the dripping curtain create a coordinating format. followed by the shape of the fountain, a geometric way of displaying can be rather fit with the space and theme.  The sound of water become a distraction of the exhibition which when I was holding as a mean to engage the viewer's intention become somehow a failure or a misread attempt also state the  power of viewer and thus I thought this is a postmodern way of seeing the critics/ viewers by rotating their opinions within the room thus become a break from what happened in 60s as Alloway describe " The interpretation were being dominated pretty much bounded by the intentions of the artist, which there is a corresponding neglect of comparative and historical information (p7)" and point a direction to Duchamp were trying to propose that the function of audience is to determine the meaning of the work when it is out of the artist's hands by variable acts of "deciphering and interpreting."

     At the last, Cascade Falls ended last friday, with thanks to everyone who made it to the exhibition and the crit.  We received varies of comments and I found them highly relevant to the issue that we were trying to engage with, and from this project we founded another starting point, the power of the viewer, blurred boundary between the tangible and intangible lines, shared memory (common timespace)and thus to the interpretation from the viewer, the failure, the melancholic feeling as an aesthetic approach... to take us to different direction.