Song Dong
Song Dong
Song Dong, Same Bed Different Dreams No. 3, 2018.
Song Dong’s art confronts notions of memory, impermanence, waste, consumerism and the urban environment. Simultaneously poetic and political, personal and global, his work explores the intricate connection between life and art.
Same Bed Different Dreams No. 3 (2018) has been created using everyday household objects, such as crockery, pendant lights and decorative knick-knacks. These mundane objects are presented on a double bed carrying the memory of the rise of his generation, behind a polished case composed of salvaged window panels, the useless byproduct of modernization. Though each window has been carefully enhanced by Song Dong with vibrantly coloured mirror or glass, their recycled nature is nevertheless evident from the still flaking paint and rusting latches. These collaged remnants of people’s homes carry with them the history of a city and the lives of its people. As viewers are invited to peek inside, they are transformed into voyeurs: imagining their homes, their stories and perhaps identifying shared experiences, and primed to think of the future.
Song Dong has continued his investigations of the varied cultural meanings of windows. As barriers between living spaces and the wider world, windows offer key perspective through which people view the outside environment. In the process of being opened or closed, windows can alter the relationships between individuals and the external world. Through changes in color and form, they can transform the world’s appearance in the eyes of the viewer. Song Dong’s work builds on the rhetorical and aesthetic significance that has been associated with windows since ancient times.
Song Dong, Usefulness of Uselessness - Compressed Window No. 03, 2020-2021.
More Posts from Caitlin-mcc03 and Others
Anastasia Savinova - Genius Loci
Genius Loci is a journey to a multitude of places, urban and rural, inhabited and peopleless, accessible and secluded. The project explores the character and the spirit of the place. Each work is a visual archive, where one picture concentrates the essence and the feeling of a visited site. Streets and mountain passes, encounters on the road and off-road are a rich source of visual information such as form, color and texture; at the same time, all the encountered environments contain something incorporeal. Ancient Romans believed that every place has a protective spirit - genius loci; in contemporary usage, genius loci refers to location’s specific atmosphere and the way it is experienced. Each work is composed of numerous photographs of buildings and landscape forms that are true and authentic for a studied area. These works balance between documentary and fiction, factual and imaginary spaces, and become keepers of the memory and the spirit of the Place.
Genius loci / RU / The other side of St.Petersburg, Collage, printed on paper, various sizes.
Genius loci / NL / 2009.
Genius loci / IT / 2011
Deirdre Frost
Áitreabh 2021, oil and acrylic on birch panels attached together with lift-off hinges, approx. 350 x 300 cm.
Baile 2021, Oil on board, 80 cm x 120 cm.
Claire Barclay
“psychological relationships between human beings and the objects that we live with and produce.”
Thrum The MAC, Belfast, 2022 Dyed canvas, steel, rust, steel wire, linen thread, embroidered rust stained linen fabric, engine grease, machined aluminium.
Paul Sermon
The bed is an object that is understood in all social and cultural contexts. Its semiotic language vary from the childhood context of security and play to the more complex context of privacy, intimacy and relaxation. When such a "charged" object is used as a telematic interface the user is confronted by the complexity of the object/interface and not the complexity of the technology. The telematic experience of communication is heightened when the technology involved is secondary to the primary point of importance, the bed interface. The technology disappears and becomes invisible. The bed is a very intensive object. The users are sometimes reluctant to enter "Telematic Dreaming", not because of the video technology, but because of the potential interaction on the bed in the public space.
Clarissa Sligh
Reframing the Past (1984-1994) could also be titled Re-Reading the Family Album. From 1984 to 1994, Sligh’s work centred on a re-investigation and re-evaluation of her family’s photo album. Growing up in the blue collar, black neighbourhood of Halls Hill in Arlington, Virginia in the 1950’s, keeping up the family album was something the artist took great pride in. Not realizing that her early family album project was created through the lens of a stereotypical white American family, she saw the project as making a record of positive images of her black family.
She Sucked Her Thumb, 1989, cyanotype, 27.5 × 21.5 cm (10 13/16 × 8 7/16 in.)
Enrica Casentini
Open Doors
The door is a symbol of border, of passage from a dimension to another one, from inside to outside.It can be open or closed.From the door to the house, an intimate space of identification, from house to city, extensive space of passage or stay where peoples, races and religions live together.Sometimes it's more difficult to open own doors. In this work I wanted to represent the individual and his will to open. Houses, like individuals, are many and different from each other. All doors are open to signify the choice of every individual, they rapesent the human will to open to exchange. For this reason the title of my work is "the open doors", it's my strong opinion that doors and borders can became place of exchange not of division.
Clarissa Sligh - What's happening with Momma?
Clarissa Sligh, What’s Happening With Momma? (Outside), 1987, Silk-screened with acrylic ink on 100% rag Coventry 320 gram soft white paper and 100% rag Stonehenge 250 gram cream paper.
What’s Happening with Momma? is a dimensional, house-shaped book that unfolds to tell an autobiographical story from the author. The book is shaped like her childhood home, a row house with steps where she sat as a child hearing scary noises coming from within. Sligh engages her viewers to walk through the rooms of this house to learn about her memories of her sister’s birth – her momma’s screams; her brother trembling; her rocking back and forth; the stork bringing her new sister.
Ghost Buildings
"It’s short of a shared tone of memory that’s left like breath on a mirror."
Lyon, France
Newcastle Upon Tyne, England
Marlene MacCallum - Book Works
Recording my visible environment and ordinary occurrences of daily life has been the persistent pursuit of my practice. I am fascinated by our relationship with the spaces that frame and objects that fill most daily lives, and yet, are overlooked as we move through our routines in a state of inattentional blindness.
Do Not Enter, partially expanded view, 18 × 23 × 80 cm (extended), 1998. This is a tunnel book that leads you through contradictory experiences of a text which attempts to deny entrance and images that beckon by offering passageways. It obliquely refers to the absurdity of attempting to define territory.
Obvert, hand bound bookwork with accordion structure, photogravure and letterpress, 28.5 × 21 × 1 cm (closed) and 43 × 140 cm (expanded), 1997.
In this work, I am exploring how the ordinary can so easily become the extraordinary. Initially, the images and text describe a childhood memory of interior space inverting but then as one moves through the book and closer to the spaces, the shift between normal and odd occurs via representations of tactile sensations.
Details of pink story: sinistral, opening the book work and fully opened view, 96 × 122 cm (expanded size), 2004—05.
This two-volume collaborative work with Barb Hunt brings together two seemingly contradictory representations of a woman's life. pink story: dextral is an artificially constructed narrative of a stereotypical woman's life. Paint chips offer the promise of covering flaws, and the paint surface creates a façade. In contrast to this external perspective, pink story: sinistral presents an internalized story; constructed of photographs that represent spaces metaphoric of key stages in a woman's life. The use of the tile format in both volumes links the pieces together formally, and the visual narratives become mosaics. The result is two volumes that are like mirror images, reflecting each other, and offering to the viewer a paradoxical reality.
Townsite House, 25.3 × 25.3 cm (page size), 2006. The Townsite House Project is a two-part body of work consisting of a series of 34 toned, fibre-based silver gelatin prints and a book work. The project was inspired by the experience in living in Corner Brook’s Townsite area. Four models of homes were built in the 1920-30’s by the pulp and paper mill for their management and skilled labour. I photographed in five homes – all the same model as the one I live in. I wanted to provide a reading experience that would give the visual equivalence of the uncanny experience of being in homes that are the same/not the same as mine. The book work makes use of a mediated process of representation. Using photogravure, film transparencies, screenprinting and letterpress, the hand bound book work layers and mirrors images and text to echo the architectural palimpsest. The videos of the maquettes provide information on the evolution of the structure and content of the book work.
Glaze: Reveal:, 21 × 42 cm, 2013.
Glaze: Reveal and Veiled is one of a series of book works inspired by the experience of living in Corner Brook’s Townsite area on the west coast of the island of Newfoundland. Between 1924-34 the pulp mill built 150 homes to house the mill management and skilled labourers. Over a period of 10 years, I have photographed in several homes, all the same model as the one I live in. These homes vary in condition from close to original in design and décor to highly renovated. This project gave me the rare opportunity to record the evolution of interior aspects of these homes. It has been the context to explore the paradoxical phenomena of conformity and individualization that occurs in a company town. Having grown up in a suburban housing development, my earliest memories of home is that of living in a space that is reminiscent of my neighbors’. Each artist’s book explores a distinct facet of image memory, multiplicity, sequence and offers the viewer a visual equivalence of the uncanny. Glaze: Reveal and Veiled presents 24 images of Townsite windows grouped into two distinct sequences. The structure is a dos à dos and each side offers a different visual metaphor for memory. The closed book is contained within a wrapper and the viewer has the option of choosing which side to enter first. Each begins similarly with endpapers made from scans of window curtains followed by line drawings of the window frames as the graphic for the title pages. Moving into Glaze: Reveal, the viewer is presented with a spread consisting of a blank white space on the verso and dense black on the recto. Turning the page, the next spread presents an image of a window on the verso and a dense black field on the recto with a glimmer of light appearing. As the viewer continues to move through the pages, each spread reveals a new window image that has been visually peeled away from the densely layered recto. The layering slowly becomes visible revealing the final presentation of single images. In contrast, moving into Glaze: Veiled the viewer begins with a window image that is layered with the previous title page line drawing. In the next spread, the same window is presented alone on the verso. The recto side layers the previous images as well as introducing the upcoming image. The viewer experiences a visual déjà vu each time the pages turn. The progress through the work results in ever more layered and veiled images.
Glaze: Veiled: , 21 × 42 cm, 2013
Mattias Lind
mattias lind, a partner at scandinavian practice white arkitekter, has developed ‘chameleon cabin’ a house constructed entirely from paper. as the name suggests, the structure changes its appearance depending on the viewer’s perspective, comprising dual black and white façades. looking to explore the limits of the renewable and versatile material, the modular design has the potential to be extended to several hundred meters if required.
