INTERFACE

REVIEW

Making tracks - Performing Place

http://www.performingplace.com/, Cochester
15 September 2009 - 29 June 2012

Reviewed by: Phil Collins »

The artist Gordon Flemons has produced beautiful, strange, and mesmerising animated 3D drawings as a result of his exploration of the spatial nature of the theatre of the every day.

Working with a number of community groups in Colchester and using a GPS tracking,  technology  Flemons constructs virtual sculptures that reveal the shape and form of communities going about their every day routines, the journeys and  performances that trace out the line we live our lives along.

These virtual works represent a narrative, progressing both in space and time, exploring the character of  place that arises from the interactions between the environment and  people.

The works take their inspiration from recent developments in spatial theory,  the emergence of performative and or practice based ontologies (Amin; Anderson; Crang; Harrison; Painter). Leaving the straight jacket of the classic vocabularies of spatial thought, such as scale, territory  and boundaries, it examines the conceptual vocabularies that are able to attend to the 'life' of space, as part of the artist's exploration of  site as a performed place, where society does more than simply exist in space.

The works are also influenced by the work of  earlier spatial theorists such as  Bill Hilliers & Julienne Hanson  (whose  company Space Syntax was brought in to advise on the re-development plans for the St Botolph’s Quarter of Colchester) and by  E.W Soja’s concept of spatial triallectics,  including thirdspace, or spaces that are both real and imagined.

By interpolating the movements, tracks and interactions of  Colchester’s people against time, Flemons’ work  gives a unique form to the daily performance of its communities and  reveals their spatial nature and interdependencies.

Making Tracks-Performing Place is an Open Space Project for Essex County Council and Commissions East.

 

Writer detail:

Phil Collins is an artist and illustrator.

He is a Trustee of the Centre for Contemporary Art & the Natural World, Exeter and a member of the Society of Architectural Illustration.

Venue detail:
http://www.performingplace.com/

www.performingplace.com/ 

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