After Image
Exhibition for WestSpace
Picture Yourself was located within a shopping mall, Melbourne Central, in the main business area of Melbourne city. Photobooths used to be all over Melbourne, usually outside train stations but also in arcades and and foyers. They provided the public the opportunity to self document an excursion or a friendship in a period when photography was more expensive and required time to take, process and develop the film. The proposition invited mall occupants to record aural portraits and take photographic self-portraits in the booth and then cumulatively fill the exhibition space, slowly building up the images and sound until it formed a crowd, constructing a community of sorts, made up of many individuals describing and picturing themselves.
Cameron Bishop and Simon Reis an installation collaboration, planned to inhabit a second space located behind the area where the work I was developing was to be shown. They proposed that they would construct a two-third scale replica of the first space, and the Picture Yourself exhibition within it, but add mechanisms and a diorama that would spatially transform the space. At random intervals some of the walls and a column were engineered to shake, and the lights would flash on and off. After a minute or so the room would go dark and a small room concealed behind a two-way mirror was illuminated, exposing a kind of hideout with various abandoned or broken commercial objects. Their proposal related to their specific conceptual concerns on the subjective nature of experience and affect of consumerist structures.
The arrangement of the two spaces, Picture Yourself, and the second space made by Bishop and Reis that reconstituted the organisation and material of the first space, had a doubling effect as they operated individually and in a discordant resonance with each other. Passing through the first room into the two-thirds scale of the second room was a spatially curious experience, making visible a literal loop where one work was informing the next, a duplication with difference.
