THE EMPTY STAGE

Presence and absence of artist is one thing but what about when the participant and artist are both absent? Because the situations I create rely upon a physical structure within a site there will always be a point when the installation or setting for the encounter is completely unactivated and empty
of people.

 

My work has always attempted to capture and present a type of setting, encounter, a place for performance. For Bravado evoked all the emotions and identities associated with karaoke; 9” and
Say Hi From Me an intimate situation etc. The strength in the image of the empty situation, similar to Tim Etchells and Hugo Glendinning's images in Empty Stages (2003), “lies precisely in the absences to which they claim to be witness and their carefully composed ambivalence toward the meanings of the spaces they present” (Kaye, N. Archaeologies of Presence, 2012).

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Etchells described them as “spaces of expectation” and it is this expectation that helps to prepare participants for my situations helping to establish performance identities and roles in their thinking and physicality long before they even enter the encounter.