Album Pages...the found photograph.

 Album Pages: collage and found photographs (detail)

I spoke of the 'Album Pages' from Urban-Poetic: the waste books as part of my artist talk recently. Understandably several viewers made associations with house plans or some form of architectural design, as if  these aerial views of houses  pieced together by found photographs and textual notations were a metaphor for attempting to reassemble/recover a sense of a lost past. Some of which has a layer of truth but the deliberate or conscious construction of  architectural forms was never my intention. 

The use of the found photograph as an object  is already embedded with references to memory, the past and the transitional nature of life. For myself it felt as though I was simply reconstructing a fragment of some undecipherable historical narrative...nothing more than a moment taken from the past placed within the marginal edges of the pages of an album. Their placement always within the edges was a deliberate link to the notion of history forever being an experience of fragmented narratives situated within the peripheries of our everyday lives. 

Now that I have had some time and distance from these works I think that essentially they gesture towards the nature of history, something re-constructed and pieced back together, either through a collective or individual re-telling of a constructed narrative. Then there are the layers of meaning that history imports, both consciously and unintentionally. Often the recording of history conflates the particulars of personal stories within a broader narrative or a single individual narrative is held up as the collective experience of a community or nation. As Gadamer describe it..'the past is foreign and historical understanding is not so much a recovery of the past as a mediation between our sense of ourselves and our sense of the past'.

These unassuming responses are little more than gestures to such 'big ideas' but there is something in the dissected landscapes, fractious interiors and inverted figures that at least holds sway, even momentarily, within what history or the past inescapably delivers...loss.

URBAN-POETIC: the waste books...print, collage and book assemblage works by glen skien

is showing at the Wooloongabba Art Gallery until June 25.  . 

 Album Pages: collage and found photographs (detail)

Album Pages; collage and postcard (detail)

Album Pages; collage and postcard (detail)