Duality

Alexandra Clapham & Penelope Benton

Opening 01.05.15 6-8pm
Artist Talks 23.05.15 6-7pm

As part of an ongoing series investigating our relationship as both partners and collaborative artists, this work considers an underlying internal dialogue, simultaneous competition and submission of ego, a battle of ideas and working rhythms, and a shared interest in spatial intervention.

Human reflexivity works through internal conversations. This type of dialogue draws upon emotions, sensations and images. In this work, a series of individual self-portraits have been made separately, and in succession, each work responds to the previous made portrait of the other. There is an internal dialogue between the artists, and through the work.

Sometimes confused with Duel, meaning an arranged fight between two people, Dual is a notion of paired concepts that mirror one another. In what we interpret as a binary meaning, the idea of this exhibition is a layered one of conflict, collaboration and individuality. A stand-off.

It is said that ‘working separately together (is) a working process that produce(s) undecomposable understandings by collectively engaging in practices of self, and of self-other, reflexivity.’(1) It is believed that through working together separately, ‘we’ become an ‘interpretive us’ and thereby create an understanding of the work that is common to us as a team.

In Duality we explore these ideas, and through the installation of the work, deliberately place, or invite the audience into this internal dialogue between us.

Although presented in video format, this work was developed as an adaptation of the traditional tableau vivant that has been prevalent in our previous works. In the late 80s, art historian Jean-François Chevrier outlined the key characteristic of the contemporary photographic tableau, as summoning a confrontational experience on the part of the spectator, in contrast to the conventional reception or consumption of the popular medium in magazines or the cinema.

(1) Siltanen, Willis and Scobie ‘Separately Together - Working Reflexively as a Team’ Carleton University, Ottawa Canada