Vince Dziekan: The Ammonite Order, Or Objectiles for an (Un)Natural History


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Title:


    The Ammonite Order, Or Objectiles for an (Un)Natural History

Artist(s) and People Involved:


Symposium:


Venue(s):


Medium:


    Digital prints, laser cut Perspex, mixed media, digital media, iPods, variable installation

Artist Statement:


    Revolving upon notions of coincidence and synchronicity, The Ammonite Order, Or Objectiles for an (Un) Natural History explores a nondeterministic relation between digital mediation and spatial practice that supplants the primacy of real objects present in gallery space. The theme for this work evolved out of imaginatively projecting a fictive ‘correspondence’ between two local personages: the architect George Dance (the Younger) and naturalist Charles Darwin. Enamoured with the idea of the museum as a ‘haunt of the muses’, the narrative fabula unfolds as a multidimensional installation that combines an inventory of installation elements (or ‘props’) with an accompanying collection of portable media ‘samples’. These forms gain added force through their recycling and recombination. Collectively, these motifs establish an iconography that operates across the exhibition’s interconnected, narrative structure.

    The exhibit sends out contradictory signals: the appearance of order associated with its measured use of gallery space is confounded by the disorientation of its intertextual, mediated narrative. Through creating an unpredictable and open-ended aesthetic experience in which the viewer is invited to actively intuit associations between the constituent parts of the exhibition, the conventional expectation placed upon digital mediation – in which the interpretive role of the ‘gallery guide’ is intended to supplement the primary experience of an art object – is inverted. The Ammonite Order was developed as a practice-based demonstration exhibition as part of the PhD thesis, ‘Without Walls: Virtuality and the Art of Exhibition’. The artist acknowledges the cooperation The Slade School of Fine Art, The Grant Museum of Zoology (University College London), the support of the Outside Studies Program (OSP) of Monash University, the Faculty of Art & Design, ISEA2009 and Apple in the realisation of this work.

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