On Display at St. John Market

2 Meters x 4 Meters

Meat, Projection, Trays 

August 2018

 

I Died and Saw the Butcher’s Lights, doesn’t take its name from anything existing in literature or any mundane phrase, instead the title represents the dead meat being displayed as a consumer object under the butchers light. 

 

Within my practice, I’ am concerned with the artist associated with consumer space. Whether by dealing with the space on location or reconfiguring the space for the gallery.

 

This installation takes into account an existing consumer space and representing that space on location. Creating an altered reality of what the public is normally expecting as a consumer landscape for buying meat.

 

For the making of the installation, I used what exists within the consumer display, with the lights, what is for sale as mediums for my work. The elements I used to construct the installation were all sourced from the original consumer location, buying raw meat to place on the butchers delivery trays, recording the display lights with an open lens. In this process changing the context of how the light is perceived as fluorescent tubes, instead of recording with an open lens, allows the light to flicker and interfere with the camera's lighting mechanism. Also placing the projector on top of another delivery instrument. The set up of the installation was to represent that of the consumer display, therefore representing the recorded light directly onto the meat which is sitting on the meat tray. 

 

I wanted to use the butcher's store as my prime location, for the reason the lights are an integral part of the cabinet display, for the reason they are designed to enhance the food for sale, in the same manner as gallery lights are spotlit to enhance the work on display. There is indeed a fine line between how objects are presented with a consumer and exhibition space. Heightening the significant of an item with a variation of lights. I combined both locations treating a vacant unit next door to the butchers as a pop-up show, seeing the installation side by side the passing public can see the significance of the raw meat, one for a purchasable item, the other being used as an art object. 

 

I have created work on location within the supermarket changing rooms and photo booths, however, this work does something different in terms of representing the consumer landscape amongst the space shoppers are passing. Site-specific in terms of being displayed in the same location the original installation element inhabits.

 

Using a blank consumer space to construct the installation amongst the already operating retail stores. The viewers are intended to be the accidental audience who walk by already in the context of shopping- the blank vacant unit is next door to the butcher’s space, seeing side by side a reconfigured consumer space with the real.