Poeming

Helen Grogan

Opening 07.09.16 6-8pm
Artist Talks 29.09.16 6-7pm

POEMING (with insistence on plurality), is the second iteration of Helen Grogan’s solo exhibition for Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne 2015. This project is a distillation of long-term research into space(s), observation, and the politics within procedures of view.

“In Helen Grogan’s work the line between viewing bodies, live performance and objects (sculptural 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...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.’ Grogan’s dispositifs slow the viewer’s gaze, engage the body and direct the viewer to elements of space that frequently go unobserved.” 1

“In POEM (with insistence on plurality) video material filmed, edited and reedited in the gallery during the installation and exhibition is displayed on two monitors resting on wheeled structures.The videos are compiled of long takes of the structures installed in the gallery, long takes of the gallery space, long takes of the street outside the gallery..., and long takes of the work against a backdrop, with photographic studio lighting. The diegetic sounds captured during filming extend the portraits of the space into layered sonic fields, oscillating both between the two monitors, and the interior and exterior of the gallery. The videos draw attention to the formal and material qualities of the structures and to their performances in different spatial contexts, as well as participate in the close observation of the site (both inside and outside).” 2


1,2 - Excepts from Sarinah Masukor’s catalogue text ‘Helen Grogan - POEM (with insistence on plurality)’, Gertrude Contemporary, 2015