July 2014
Enclave
Autumn Collapse /
Kristin Luke and Susan Conte
Autumn Collapse is an installation which physically traces the literary space of a collection of autobiographical texts written by Conte and Luke. Each week, an event takes place in the installation: a reading group, a workshop, a performance, a dinner. Participants contribute, augment, and become variously implicated within the narrative, whether as characters, distanced critics, or narrators. These interventions directly feed into the exhibition installation itself, the installation becoming the physical counterpart to the texts that exist virtually. Texts and installation in some ways coalesce, in others are jarringly inconsistent, but always remain entangled.
Autumn Collapse proposes that the moment of personal expression marks a porousness between the internal ‘I’ and the exterior. As the locations of where our subjectivity is formed become increasingly fragmented, dispersed, virtual, a reevaluation of this porousness becomes necessary. The distinctions between caricature, illustration, autobiography, poeticism, and personal truth are muddled. Building on the notion of the Romantic ironic literary/artistic subject, Autumn Collapse models a new framework for how artist/author, the work, and the spectator can operate, where each of these elements are simultaneously unfinished parts and autonomous wholes - an irresolveable synechdoche. Autumn Collapse hangs in the balance here.
July 2013
Grizedale Arts
Youth Club Summer Restaurant
A pop-up restaurant planned and operated through a collaboration with the Youth Club of Coniston village, Cumbria. 3D models of future restaurant sites, all nearby Coniston, were projected onto a landscape painting by JM Crossland in the dining room as the dinner took place. Paper models of the sites were made for the Honest Shop.