Looking Forwards and Backwards

2017

Collaboration with Lucy Meyle

Looking Forwards and Backwards playfully tests collaborative ways of looking and listening in exhibition making and practice. Working together in friendship depends on practicing the spaces between ideas, ways of seeing, and feeling. A collaborator's motivations and ideas, no matter how well communicated, are always slightly hazy. Instead of being able to look straight on at thoughts [everything right ahead, everything in perspective], thoughts are caught in peripheral visions - glimpses of meaning come to the fore only every now and then. The interplay of ideas and experiences explored in this exhibition are drawn from a series of parallel letters between the artists. These letters generated the thinking and making of the exhibition. In the gallery, 'Looking Forwards and Backwards' opens up this text as a field of potentiality for the viewer where subjectivities are made and remade.

" The use of two slowly rotating mirrors and their reflections, alters the plane of light into perspective. These mirrors re-direct light, the image shown is a consequence of projected light of course, but here its source is refracted, in a multiplicity of factors. Returning to the inside of the constructed ramp, a site of actual projection, where interlocutors rarely visited, the time-mirror-image floats by and is initially bifurcated by the mirrors, the projection hits the back of the mirrors, and they become screens, then as they slowly rotate the silver quality of the projected image is again picked up and reflected in the mirror and thrown round and even out of the room. The actuality of the site and the virtual over there of the mirror spaces are made contiguous. If you look at these two diagrams (below) researched and collected by Ziggy and Lucy and then combine their significances and manifest their perspectives, you have the two circling mirrors of the work in From wall to wall and moving to the centre (2017) pre-and post-Archive.

Figure 3. Diagram showing the plane of incidence as the plane containing the reflection of an incident ray at a 45 degree angle after bouncing off a mirrored surface. The angles of incidence and reflection are measured with respect to the surface normal. (Uncaptioned figure in Unknown, ‘Geometrical Optics: Reflection’, Unknown, https://archive.cnx.org/contents/94a248df-2654-4ff8-9d8f-e82ad81b6f7f@1/geometrical-optics-reflection.)

Figure 4. Diagram showing the plane of incidence as the plane containing the reflection of an incident ray at a 45-degree angle after bouncing off a mirrored surface. The plane of incidence is the plane including the incident ray, reflected ray, and the surface normal. (Uncaptioned figure in Ibid.) "

- from Andy Thomson, milieu, utilising its borders, fields and fora of subjective discursion. Catalouge essay for Looking Forwards and Backwards, 10.2.2018.

listen to the sound works here:

4th Dimension explained, CD audio for headphones, 14:16 duration. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rG6aIVGquOg

The Asters at Sandfly Bay, CD audio for headphones, 10:25 duration.

The growing requirements of works, CD audio for headphones, 02:49 duration. Adapted text from "The Garden Planner" by Gardener Royal Ashley Stephenson (1981)

Looking Forwards and Backwards is part of an ongoing collaboration between Lucy and Ziggy. Previous iterations of the project include 'Drawing from Memory', part of the 'City Loop Project', Newmarket Park, 2017; 'Working Together', exhibition at ST Paul Street Gallery Three, 2015; 'Storage Solutions', part of 'Group Shower', FUZZY VIBES, 2015; 'Knowing You're Wrong (I&II)', exhibition at ST Paul Street Galleries One & Three, 2014.

Image credits: Grace Ryder.