Artspace

Overview

Gary Carsley has developed a practice sourced in sub-cultural performance strategies and nourished on old copies of Art & Text. Looking At Works Of Art In The Light Of Other Works of art borrowed sideways from popular entertainment pastimes like karaoke and drag: not literally as actions but as modes of translation and by extension creative authorship. The appropriational and deconstructive methodologies extrapolated out of these performance traditions can provide a useful model for working with all the inter-related technologies given away these days with cameras, scanners and computers. The Draguerreotypes (c-type monoprints) were made by the hollowing out of quiescent photographic, artisanal and landscape conventions passing as simulacra bearing no relation to any reality whatever. A copy without an original, a photograph without a negative* - dragged, mashed, ripped and hacked - new worlds from old.

* Paraphrased from J. Baudrillard, The Precession of Simulacra, Art & Text No. 11, translated by the Pauls Foss and Patton (1983)