POEM (with insistence on plurality), 2018
glass, transport strapping, tie down strap, canvas photography background screen, paper photography background roll, adjustable photography background crossbar, 2 x Sony Bravia screens 1230 cm x 753 cm each, 2 x single channel videos (and diegetic sound) with durations varying, looped, steel, epoxy enamel, casters, Galerie Stadtpark main exhibition space.
for: ‘Up to and Including - Helen Grogan’, curated by David Komary, Galerie Stadtpark, Krems an der Donau
glass, transport strapping, tie down strap, canvas photography background screen, paper photography background roll, adjustable photography background crossbar, 2 x Sony Bravia screens 1230 cm x 753 cm each, 2 x single channel videos (and diegetic sound) with durations varying, looped, steel, epoxy enamel, casters, Galerie Stadtpark main exhibition space.
for: ‘Up to and Including - Helen Grogan’, curated by David Komary, Galerie Stadtpark, Krems an der Donau
from David Komary’s pubication, Position, 2019:
Grogan’s installations alternate between conceptual rigor and an aesthetic openness that can be experienced spatially in a more precise kinaesthetic manner, which at times also permits contemplative, even immersive moments. However, the viewer can never rely too long on one or other respective reading, interpretation, or categorization of what’s seen, he/she can not fall back on a particular viewer’s perspective or way of seeing. The artist works concisely with a provoked immersive or semantic collapse. The observer is confronted with a subtly overwhelming, contingent, but nonetheless non-arbitrary perceptual scenario, which essentially returns the responsibility to him/herself as a perceptual actor. Grogan works with a notion of expanded and conceptual choreography that shifts the clear division between author / artist and perceiver. In so doing she does not seek to create a meta-level superordinate to sensory perception that would merely (re) organize, configure, and therefore simply re-structure the sensory impressions hierarchically. Rather, Grogan aims at a “sensing" thinking, which always connects and relates cognition and understanding to sensory perception. Instead of clarity, assignability, and consumability of spatial perceptual events, the viewer finds him/herself in a deliberately epistemologically blurry perceptual scenario that does not situate cognition (epistemology) and sensory perception in opposition to one another but seeks their connection and reciprocity in order to create space for a kind of aestheticological cognition. (A.G. Baumgarten)
Grogan views the exhibition as fundamentally performative. The artist works with elements of spatial displacement, of shifting and reconfiguring in order to highlight the temporal-procedural dimension of the spatial. Her work seeks to create a kind of awareness of one’s own body, an awareness of the productive potential in the process of perception, and the perception of an incessantly, albeit often imperceptibly shifting presence and reality.
...Visitors are prompted to survey the installation, which begins by subtly choreographing their movements. Almost incidentally and matter-of-factly they also “encounter” two screens—what already count these days as conventional flat screen televisions—which provide fragmentary and excerpt-like shots of the spatial scenario. Presented are film sequences depicting the space in a highly intimate and poetic manner, e.g. a close-up shot of the slowly rotating glass surface suspended from the ceiling. However, viewers are also confronted with picturesque overall views that also repeatedly depict what’s seen and heard on the periphery, i.e. the “aura” of the exhibition space, including objects lying around the exhibition building, doors opening and closing, etc. The imagery makes the individual objects seem like spatial agents, at times even “protagonists” with unique characters and expressions. The presented images, conceived from the outset as essential parts of the installation, are therefore not simply shots of the process of setting up the installation, but call into question the object-protagonists in a pictorial (filmic) manner, investigate how these all “behave” in the space at various times, representing an essential integral component of the installative structure.
Grogan examines in a sculptural-spatial, but also a temporal and process-reflexive manner the concurrence of object (s) and exhibition space. This practice and rehearsal in space is a result not only of the interaction and interplay of the objects but also of the variability of their aesthetic status.
Grogan’s installations alternate between conceptual rigor and an aesthetic openness that can be experienced spatially in a more precise kinaesthetic manner, which at times also permits contemplative, even immersive moments. However, the viewer can never rely too long on one or other respective reading, interpretation, or categorization of what’s seen, he/she can not fall back on a particular viewer’s perspective or way of seeing. The artist works concisely with a provoked immersive or semantic collapse. The observer is confronted with a subtly overwhelming, contingent, but nonetheless non-arbitrary perceptual scenario, which essentially returns the responsibility to him/herself as a perceptual actor. Grogan works with a notion of expanded and conceptual choreography that shifts the clear division between author / artist and perceiver. In so doing she does not seek to create a meta-level superordinate to sensory perception that would merely (re) organize, configure, and therefore simply re-structure the sensory impressions hierarchically. Rather, Grogan aims at a “sensing" thinking, which always connects and relates cognition and understanding to sensory perception. Instead of clarity, assignability, and consumability of spatial perceptual events, the viewer finds him/herself in a deliberately epistemologically blurry perceptual scenario that does not situate cognition (epistemology) and sensory perception in opposition to one another but seeks their connection and reciprocity in order to create space for a kind of aestheticological cognition. (A.G. Baumgarten)
Grogan views the exhibition as fundamentally performative. The artist works with elements of spatial displacement, of shifting and reconfiguring in order to highlight the temporal-procedural dimension of the spatial. Her work seeks to create a kind of awareness of one’s own body, an awareness of the productive potential in the process of perception, and the perception of an incessantly, albeit often imperceptibly shifting presence and reality.
...Visitors are prompted to survey the installation, which begins by subtly choreographing their movements. Almost incidentally and matter-of-factly they also “encounter” two screens—what already count these days as conventional flat screen televisions—which provide fragmentary and excerpt-like shots of the spatial scenario. Presented are film sequences depicting the space in a highly intimate and poetic manner, e.g. a close-up shot of the slowly rotating glass surface suspended from the ceiling. However, viewers are also confronted with picturesque overall views that also repeatedly depict what’s seen and heard on the periphery, i.e. the “aura” of the exhibition space, including objects lying around the exhibition building, doors opening and closing, etc. The imagery makes the individual objects seem like spatial agents, at times even “protagonists” with unique characters and expressions. The presented images, conceived from the outset as essential parts of the installation, are therefore not simply shots of the process of setting up the installation, but call into question the object-protagonists in a pictorial (filmic) manner, investigate how these all “behave” in the space at various times, representing an essential integral component of the installative structure.
Grogan examines in a sculptural-spatial, but also a temporal and process-reflexive manner the concurrence of object (s) and exhibition space. This practice and rehearsal in space is a result not only of the interaction and interplay of the objects but also of the variability of their aesthetic status.
Helen Grogan, POEM (with insistence on plurality), 2015
glass, transport strapping, tie down strap, canvas photography background screen, paper photography background roll, adjustable photography background crossbar, 2 x Sony Bravia LED screens 1230 cm x 753 cm each, 2 x intermittently re-edited single channel videos (and diegetic sound) with durations varying, looped, headphones, steel, epoxy enamel, casters, Gertrude Glasshouse interior and entrance, sunlight, wind
at: Gertrude Gertrude Glasshouse, Naarm Melbourne
glass, transport strapping, tie down strap, canvas photography background screen, paper photography background roll, adjustable photography background crossbar, 2 x Sony Bravia LED screens 1230 cm x 753 cm each, 2 x intermittently re-edited single channel videos (and diegetic sound) with durations varying, looped, headphones, steel, epoxy enamel, casters, Gertrude Glasshouse interior and entrance, sunlight, wind
at: Gertrude Gertrude Glasshouse, Naarm Melbourne
from Sarinah Masukor’s catalogue text:
In Helen Grogan’s work the line between viewing bodies, live performance and objects (structures, monitors, film) is often barely visible. Their interaction articulates elements of space and encourages an extraordinary physical concentration on the present. Grogan’s practice is a continuous process of looking and listening. It is a process both systematic and open to the accidental, a practice that is committed to attention and to the cultivation of embodied thought, in the time and space of the now. All parts of this practice, installation, video, action and photography—including a daily collection of visual research apparent in her informal Instagram feed—connect, reflect and speak back to each other and together form a body of work that is concerned with space as a dispositif. Defined by Adrian Martin as ‘the arrangement of diverse elements in such a way as to trigger, guide and organise a set of actions.’1 Grogan’s dispositifs slow the viewer’s gaze, engage the body and direct the viewer to elements of space that frequently go unobserved.
This experience of focused attention has, in previous exhibitions, been accompanied by instances of live performance. In THREE ADJOINING SPACES WITH MANIFOLD EDGES (West Space, 2015) the artist enacted two CONCERT works, where structures installed in the gallery—including steel frames, mirrors, monitors and floor matting—were adjusted and reinstalled in front of a dispersed audience. The performance began fluidly out of the time preceding it and, at the start, it was hard to tell who in the room was ‘performing’ and who was ‘watching.’ Grogan’s live works feel, at first, formless and mundane, but then, after a period of time has passed, the work’s structure suddenly breaks open and the body locks into the rhythm of the specific time and space and into a state of what Grogan calls ‘embodied observation.’ Actions that at first appeared disparate and unplanned coalesce with disarming clarity.
In POEM (with insistence on plurality), Grogan removes the performing body from the work, evincing similar effects through the performing object and its interaction with the viewing body. A suspended glass pane directs observation, framing different parts of the room in relation to where the viewer is standing, sitting or walking. This mobile glass frame is cantilevered across the full length of the gallery to a steel trolley structure. The pane and strapping shift in tandem, subject to the conditions of the space. The frame is, as Grogan observes, ‘cast adrift’ and the movement of the pane and position of the viewer in time creates re framings and infinitely variable views. In a sketch video made in preparation for the show, the glass catches the light and the movement of it illuminates the texture of a wall—a material sight that might otherwise go unnoticed. The structure’s action, and the sensation of embodied observation, develops out of the interplay of viewer and moving form.
In Helen Grogan’s work the line between viewing bodies, live performance and objects (structures, monitors, film) is often barely visible. Their interaction articulates elements of space and encourages an extraordinary physical concentration on the present. Grogan’s practice is a continuous process of looking and listening. It is a process both systematic and open to the accidental, a practice that is committed to attention and to the cultivation of embodied thought, in the time and space of the now. All parts of this practice, installation, video, action and photography—including a daily collection of visual research apparent in her informal Instagram feed—connect, reflect and speak back to each other and together form a body of work that is concerned with space as a dispositif. Defined by Adrian Martin as ‘the arrangement of diverse elements in such a way as to trigger, guide and organise a set of actions.’1 Grogan’s dispositifs slow the viewer’s gaze, engage the body and direct the viewer to elements of space that frequently go unobserved.
This experience of focused attention has, in previous exhibitions, been accompanied by instances of live performance. In THREE ADJOINING SPACES WITH MANIFOLD EDGES (West Space, 2015) the artist enacted two CONCERT works, where structures installed in the gallery—including steel frames, mirrors, monitors and floor matting—were adjusted and reinstalled in front of a dispersed audience. The performance began fluidly out of the time preceding it and, at the start, it was hard to tell who in the room was ‘performing’ and who was ‘watching.’ Grogan’s live works feel, at first, formless and mundane, but then, after a period of time has passed, the work’s structure suddenly breaks open and the body locks into the rhythm of the specific time and space and into a state of what Grogan calls ‘embodied observation.’ Actions that at first appeared disparate and unplanned coalesce with disarming clarity.
In POEM (with insistence on plurality), Grogan removes the performing body from the work, evincing similar effects through the performing object and its interaction with the viewing body. A suspended glass pane directs observation, framing different parts of the room in relation to where the viewer is standing, sitting or walking. This mobile glass frame is cantilevered across the full length of the gallery to a steel trolley structure. The pane and strapping shift in tandem, subject to the conditions of the space. The frame is, as Grogan observes, ‘cast adrift’ and the movement of the pane and position of the viewer in time creates re framings and infinitely variable views. In a sketch video made in preparation for the show, the glass catches the light and the movement of it illuminates the texture of a wall—a material sight that might otherwise go unnoticed. The structure’s action, and the sensation of embodied observation, develops out of the interplay of viewer and moving form.
POEM (with insistence on plurality), 2016
glass, transport strapping, tie down strap, 3 x paper photography background screen, adjustable photography background crossbar, 2 x Sony Bravia LED screens 1230 cm x 753 cm each, 2 x intermittently re-edited single channel videos (and diegetic sound) with durations varying, looped, steel, epoxy enamel, casters, First Draft Gallery 1 interior and exteriors through windows, sunlight, wind (installation views and video stills)
In ‘POEMING (with insistence on plurality)’ First Draft, Eora Sydney, 2016
glass, transport strapping, tie down strap, 3 x paper photography background screen, adjustable photography background crossbar, 2 x Sony Bravia LED screens 1230 cm x 753 cm each, 2 x intermittently re-edited single channel videos (and diegetic sound) with durations varying, looped, steel, epoxy enamel, casters, First Draft Gallery 1 interior and exteriors through windows, sunlight, wind (installation views and video stills)
In ‘POEMING (with insistence on plurality)’ First Draft, Eora Sydney, 2016
