Imago
2011
Digital Video
A video work that builds on the ideas of inhabiting others’ experiences and the inability to communicate with those closest to us.
Imago[1] consists of two filmed interviews between my father and myself. As a structured interview, the questions are based on two peer-interviews already undertaken with arts professionals: Ian Danby and Jason E. Bowman in March 2011 and a peer interview undertaken by my father with a senior colleague in January 1994. The scope of the interview allows discussion of childhood ambitions, adult failures and success, parenthood and contemporary art practice. The interviews took place for the first time immediately before filming. The filmed interviews are 'performances' or 're-enactments' where the interviewer becomes the interviewee. In the first segment I answer the questions with my father's answers and in the second he speaks as me.
The ‘cuckooing’ of myself into someone else’s experience or family dynamic is significant motif in my practice. Sometimes the process is a literal injection of myself in other artists’ pasts (the Art Histories series), and other times I appear as an interruption into a family group (Coop I). In Imago this process of ‘cuckooing’ also happens as external to myself - for the first time in my work - as my father becomes the receptacle for other people’s insight and opinions
[1] Imago is a psycho-analytical term for the idealisation of a person (usually a parent) formed in childhood.
Imago[1] consists of two filmed interviews between my father and myself. As a structured interview, the questions are based on two peer-interviews already undertaken with arts professionals: Ian Danby and Jason E. Bowman in March 2011 and a peer interview undertaken by my father with a senior colleague in January 1994. The scope of the interview allows discussion of childhood ambitions, adult failures and success, parenthood and contemporary art practice. The interviews took place for the first time immediately before filming. The filmed interviews are 'performances' or 're-enactments' where the interviewer becomes the interviewee. In the first segment I answer the questions with my father's answers and in the second he speaks as me.
The ‘cuckooing’ of myself into someone else’s experience or family dynamic is significant motif in my practice. Sometimes the process is a literal injection of myself in other artists’ pasts (the Art Histories series), and other times I appear as an interruption into a family group (Coop I). In Imago this process of ‘cuckooing’ also happens as external to myself - for the first time in my work - as my father becomes the receptacle for other people’s insight and opinions
[1] Imago is a psycho-analytical term for the idealisation of a person (usually a parent) formed in childhood.