Exhibition floor talk | Perennial Series
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Output Type
Other
Publication Title
Exhibition floor talk | Perennial Series
Publisher
Edith Cowan University
School
School of Arts and Humanities; ECU Galleries
Description
Exhibition Statement | Perennial series addresses the interpellation of plant-life as an instrumental resource to serve human ends. Existing value systems promote technological, ecological safe-guarding based on predeterminations of plant-life as food, medicine, tool, or source of aesthetic pleasure. The premises underpinning this work are that plants have an intrinsic value, and that they potentially have a subjectivity.
The hierarchical relations embedded in plant cultivation are inverted in Perennial series through a vegetal training of human stillness and meditative-contemplative thinking. This kind of thinking can be understood as a deep focus which is also non-determinate. Complimentary to this inversion of plant-human relations, Perennial series retreats from the drive for rational, measurable outcomes diligently adhered to throughout the day.
Within the gardens of the artist’s changing residences, an ongoing nourishment ritual with a Tagetes lucida plant is documented through time-lapse photography and stream-of-consciousness notes over 15-months. Facing the sun, artist and plant are tethered together by a silk wick drawing water from an overhead copper vessel. The focus needed to physically balance the weight of the Tagetes lucida elicits a temporal disconnection of the artist from digital communications and inhibits concurrent activity. All that is left to pass the time is the sensory experience of surrounding inputs, eventually leading to meditative-contemplative thinking. This intermittently shifts between a focus on making the artwork and the inevitable points of distraction.
Perennial series contemplates the potential for different experiences of duration across humans and plants that are distinct and largely incongruent. The partial and manipulated representations of the Tagetes lucida, artist and viewers’ differing durations in the gallery reveals a tension between their attempted convergence and the futility of this endeavour.
The training of human movement described has emerged as a product of this attempt at convergence. In the nourishment ritual, the artist is required to be still and fixed in place. Extrapolating from this relationship, the time-lapses, shown in succession as a single projection in the gallery are responsive to viewer movements. The inverting of plant-human instrumental relations implicit in this training imagines a holding of the artist (and subsequently, the viewer) in place, on call for the Tagetes lucida.
Artist Bio | Dani Andrée is a Melbourne-based artist and Masters by Research candidate at RMIT University. She has an interest in the way that functional, everyday spaces enter our conscious awareness. Suspended time, endurance, function and the direction of movement are employed to examine the ontological qualities of and relations between matter and bodies.
Past projects have included the phenomenal experience of time passing while walking through city spaces and the domestic as a perpetual point of return. An overarching sensibility connecting the works throughout her practice is a preoccupation with progression, forward or outward movement, which is suspended or modified.
Andrée’s current research posits encounters with plants that consider the tension between their role within artworks as matter and their existence as living, self-determining subjects. Artworks creating the conditions for dialogical relations between plants, the artist and the viewer provide a counterpoint to instrumentalist ways of interacting with plant life.