Utopian Nightmares/Dystopia Daydreams

La Salle Museum, 2007​

You enter the room - turn to see you - turning to see you - looking to see you.
Look, see.
See, be seen.
Watch, be watched.​

The subliminal message of every painting depends on the viewer's gaze to decipher the painted elements, to connect them to meaning beyond the frame, to make the time meaningful.In this installation the painting and the screens are specifically sited in the museum engendering two forms of watching/gazing/seeing - you as a guest and viewer and the camera, a fixture watching the room.

Two forms of watching/gazing/seeing - yourself as a viewer and the cameras (simulated) watching the room - producing images of the room you are in.

Your place in the room is omniscient - you survey the whole scene - the camera is detached and produces random images of the room you are in.

The paintings are presented for you to gaze upon, to interpret, to determine their meaning - perhaps to enjoy - perhaps revisiting. They simulate a reality, where what counts as real is what one desires it to be - maybe?

In a room intended for seeing, you and the room have become subjects and mimic the attention required of the paintings while the camera images mimic real instruments.

The screens are showing slides, no one photograph is more important than the next. They are the extreme opposite subject of the paintings; the banal content of surveillance. They represent nothing more or less than the immediate and present space.

Meaning is in the action.