Overlook, a two person show with Anita Bacic at Stacks Projects in Potts Point, Sydney, Australia in 2017
‘Here the body of the viewers will become both part of the exhibition and part of the surveillance process. The theoretical background of their collaboration ranges from texts on surveillance and consent, film and the photographic, and the human perception of both seeing and being seen. “it’s crucial we grasp the new ways that surveillance is seeping into the bloodstream of contemporary life and that the ways it does so correspond to the currents of liquid modernity”[1]. The metaphor is a complex one, involving the fluidity, mobility and ubiquity of surveillance practices in twenty-first century societies as well as the internalisation of surveillance by twenty-first century subjects and, therefore, the relationships between surveillance and health, identity and the human body. [2] Davies installation consists of a series of table based plus projection works including Blood on Silk Bleeding Out. This work is a response to the emotional impact of the surreal nature of witnessing a slow but unsuccessful bleed out within the monitoring and surveillance of an ICU. In all of the works the viewer is encouraged to bend forward to look down into the interior and becomes part of the projection surface.’ quote from the gallery website
Two works were shown.
[1] Liquid Surveillance: A Conversation (2013) David Lyon Zygmunt Bauman: p152
[2] Dr M. Jacklin 'Surveillance in the Blood Stream' private correspondence on Davies' installation at Campbelltown Arts Centre in 2013.
Blood on Silk: Blood Fountain, 2017, metal, glass, paint, ink, and found objects, 135 x 78 x 96(h)cm.
This work, Blood on Silk: Blood Fountain is the third in this series of wonder cabinet-style works. Again, a zinc box sits on a metal table. The top surface of this box holds a series of glass key or valet trays. These trays, also called pocket dump trays, are designed to hold keys, wallet, mints and all the other things carried every day. In this work the trays hold unusable glass syringes and frame either side of each viewing hole.
Underneath, in the private, subterranean sections of the work, there are small figurines scurrying and running, seeking to keep out of the light, to avoid the eye of authority. Viewers can bend to see, through the peepholes, scenes of medical or transplant tourism being played out. In one scene, a diorama of overdressed, anxious tourists perch on sunbeds around a fountain of blood-like liquid. They are being splashed as it is pumped through the system. They face away from the sight, as if unwilling to engage with what is happening. An overdressed bodyguard, wearing a suit and hat, supervises the transplant tourists in the tropical scene of fountains, palm trees and daybeds. A live organ producer sits off to one side wearing a celebratory sash that denotes his seemingly high status.
The fountain in this artwork does not work beyond 10 days. The system clogs or clots as the liquid thickens and can no longer be pumped through the system. It must be replaced to continue working. Again, this requirement that the technical, installation, or curatorial staff are complicit in the smooth running of the blood fountain further implies the reciprocal relationship between matter and people and the complicit relationship between the transplant tourist and the matter of the black-market transplanted organ.
The fountain appears to be wasteful in its use of a product generally thought to be in short supply and valuable in monetary, social, and cultural terms. The materiality of blood both connects and separates all humans; the use of blood for a fundamentally meaningless spectacle grates against these two profound but ambivalent positions at the same time.
and
Blood on Silk: Bleeding Out, 2016 metal, glass, paint, ink, projection and found objects, 135 x 78 x 96(h)cm. Photo credit Alex Wisser was the other wondercabinet table presented in this exhibition at Stacks projects in Potts Point, Sydney Australia.
Blood on Silk: Bleeding out physically consists a 12-centimetre high zinc box sitting on a metal table. Holes have been cut into the top face of the zinc; from underneath, the interior is illuminated. Domestic kitchen glassware, spray-painted on one side in silver, aluminium or chrome, sits on top of the box partially covering the peepholes. A projection is positioned to play over part of the top of the box, partly falling over the side onto the floor.
As the viewer approaches the table, the projection of drops of blood washes over the homogenised kitchenware in a sensual pattern of spread and retreat. The peepholes in the tabletop allow a partial or blinkered look into a series of linked surreal landscapes, represented by decolourised play and real medical equipment, toys and other found objects. They build up by references to the emotions or landscapes formed by the hallucinations experienced during a slow and partial bleeding out. Like a semi-permeable membrane, some things are held and others allowed to pass.
Within the zinc box, the scenes are homogenised again by the metallic spray-paint of silver, aluminium or chrome. The artefacts of both play and real medicalised equipment, memories, and trauma are washed over by the projections of dripping blood. When the viewer bends to look into the peepholes found among the glass kitchenware, they become co-opted to form part of the projection surface without necessarily giving informed consent.
Some of the scenes in the box can only be viewed or revealed when the viewer moves part of the artwork by lifting one or more of the spray-painted glassware objects. The viewer is then rewarded for what would usually be considered inappropriate behaviour in an art gallery or museum by being able to see a greater extent of the artwork in more detail. The ways the objects and internal scenes interact with the viewer, allowing and restricting access in response to particular actions, implies the work’s agency. The British archaeologist Christopher Tilley outlined this interaction as “… we touch the things and the things simultaneously touch us. The relationship is reciprocal”[1] and noted that “these things are the very medium through which we make and know ourselves.”[2] This work considers this relationship in terms of the agency described by the medicalised term “informed consent” and the way this plays out in the interaction between a viewer and an interactive work.
[1] Christopher Tilley, Webb Keane, Susanne Küchler, Michael Rowlands, and Patricia Spyer, ed. Handbook of Material Culture. (London: Sage, 2013),18
[2] Tilley, Handbook of Material Culture, 20
