Remote exhibition

Scenography

Description of Curatorial Design

Remote brings together artworks by five artists who explore what might be considered as certain ‘transpositional’ characteristics associated with the realization of virtual space.

These artists – Susan Collins, Pete Gomes, Derek Hart, Nancy Mauro-Flude and Martin Walch – approach their use of digital media distinctively and employ it in their respective practices in a variety of productive ways. The resulting inventory represents – through a diversity of expressions that include screen and projection-based moving image work, webcast transmissions, site-specific interventions and locative media – what is a common point of departure for all: a confounded sense of place and proximity. These artists explore their relation to the real world and their works demonstrate how that transaction might be constituted today when any firm sense of presence (real space) and immediacy (real time) is exacerbated by technologies that problemmatize notions of nearness and remoteness, such as the televisual, tele-communications and global positioning systems.

Conceived and expressed through the medium of the exhibition, Remote is characterised by its ‘distributed’ form. Its distinctive scenography (as the interrelationship between curatorial thematics, which are expressed through the communicative act of exposition involving scenic design, and the exhibition as the writing of that space ) draws upon the particular characteristics of the Plimsoll Gallery and its local environment, which has been incorporated into the overall sweep of the ‘expanded’ exhibition. This inclusion of other locales in the immediate proximity of the Centre for the Arts – their hyper-linking and interconnection to the exhibition – results in the transformation of the exhibition from being experienced as an ‘installation’ into something more likened to an ‘itinerary’. The installation, naturally, occupies gallery space and exercises its language and potentials, but each of these works in their own ways also utilize the gallery in more ‘instrumental’ way – as a node in a wider network – by connecting dispersed, networked and superimposed components back to that space.