WORKS
Slide Show Land 2002-Ongoing
Slide Show Land is an ongoing body of work which I began in 2001. For over a year I purchased collections of 35mm slides on e-Bay. Boxes of slides, some in special slide cases, some loose and wrapped in bubble wrap and some still in carousels they may have originally been viewed with arrived at the rate of about 2-3 a week.
Every day I viewed and sorted these collections of slides into their original sequences and in this process I was reconstructing a series of events that actually happened in someones life. Based on a true story.
I saw my role as an artist as rescuing these historic documents and to keep these families somehow together.
Dating from the 1940’s through to the late 1980’s a collection may be a roll of 36 slides taken during one day, like a wedding or a family get together, while other collections span twenty five years of babies, children growing up, travel and weddings through to funerals and burials. There is a large contingent of slides that document extensive world travel and act not only as a record of places long since changed or not but these are objects that were also created with the intention of an oral medium - the slide show - an experience at times a joy and at others a sentence to be endured.
![Slide Show Land: Photography, laminate, mirror, perspex, cupboard fittings, 35 mm projector, 35mm slides]()
Slide Show Land is an ongoing body of work which I began in 2001. For over a year I purchased collections of 35mm slides on e-Bay. Boxes of slides, some in special slide cases, some loose and wrapped in bubble wrap and some still in carousels they may have originally been viewed with arrived at the rate of about 2-3 a week.
Every day I viewed and sorted these collections of slides into their original sequences and in this process I was reconstructing a series of events that actually happened in someones life. Based on a true story.
I saw my role as an artist as rescuing these historic documents and to keep these families somehow together.
Dating from the 1940’s through to the late 1980’s a collection may be a roll of 36 slides taken during one day, like a wedding or a family get together, while other collections span twenty five years of babies, children growing up, travel and weddings through to funerals and burials. There is a large contingent of slides that document extensive world travel and act not only as a record of places long since changed or not but these are objects that were also created with the intention of an oral medium - the slide show - an experience at times a joy and at others a sentence to be endured.
Every day I viewed and sorted these collections of slides into their original sequences and in this process I was reconstructing a series of events that actually happened in someones life. Based on a true story.
I saw my role as an artist as rescuing these historic documents and to keep these families somehow together.
Dating from the 1940’s through to the late 1980’s a collection may be a roll of 36 slides taken during one day, like a wedding or a family get together, while other collections span twenty five years of babies, children growing up, travel and weddings through to funerals and burials. There is a large contingent of slides that document extensive world travel and act not only as a record of places long since changed or not but these are objects that were also created with the intention of an oral medium - the slide show - an experience at times a joy and at others a sentence to be endured.
The Slide Show Land project acquired over 300 collections in total approximately 10,000+ slides. Like any collector it is the display and sharing of the collection that brings delight and in this spirit a Slide Show Land exhibition centres around one or more collections as slide projections accompanied by selected singular images preferably printed in cibachrome.
Slide Show Land 3 Collections at Hugo Michell Gallery in Adelaide 2012
