GLASSHOUSE WALL - READY-MADE STILL LIFE

GLASSHOUSE WALL/THE READY-MADE STILL LIFE

This is a curatorial project sourced from a collection images that record random, anonymous arrangements of objects in the streets of Fitzroy and Collingwood.

In an attitude related to the flȃneur, I began recording these 'found' still life on a smart phone as I traversed the neighbourhood. Daily immersion in the street art culture of Fitzroy/Collingwood influenced my thinking concerning the possibilities inherent in egalitarian public access to visual art.

There is also an affinity between my collecting evidence of a consumer driven society in the second decade of this century and the Nouveau Réalisme of 1960's Paris. The same "poetic recycling of urban, industrial and advertising reality" occurs, but in this case selection is made by the artist as curator of evidence. The creative act is the framing of socio-political signifiers in terms of the conventions of the Still Life genre, removing them from their original context as recorded images and re-presenting them in a second and related public context.

There are fourteen images in the Glasshouse Wall/The Ready-made Still Life project attached to existing metal panels that are spaced the full length of the wall of the National Storage building that fronts Glasshouse Road, 3066.

Public engagement with the project is predicated on a degree of familiarity with the every day urban subject matter of the images while the dislocation inherent in relocation induces a simple visual 'double take'. The Ready-Made Still Life presented as wall posters aligns them with the existing protocols of image display typical of inner suburban streetscapes, further adding to the intrigue of the project.

Glasshouse Wall is an extension of the store front Urban Bodegón Project completed in Berlin in January 2015. In that case a sequence of poster size images from Collingwood and Fitzroy (Melbourne) were attached to the inside of a glass shop window facing the busy thoroughfare Sonnenalle, Neukölln .