When That Was This
Voices: Kai Wido Meyer (reading from the combined English translations of All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque, 1929) & Lisa Robertson, (reading from The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein, 1933)
Exhibition venue: Special commission for Are you experienced?, curated by Melissa Bennett, Hamilton Art Gallery
When That Was This is a theatrical sculptural installation animated by sound, light and video. The sculptures are composed of Cinefoil casts of figurative public sculptures and monuments from seven different cities, reconstructed to form ghostly figures of fragmented bodies. Framed by the recorded texts by Remarque and Stein that describe gendered perspectives on the First World War, the work is a meditation on the violence of ideology and the construction of collective memory.
“Further Farther on on, the mist clears. ends. Here They the heads turn into become whole figures; figures– tunics, coats, trousers trousers, and boots appear come out of the mist as from if from a milky pool of milk. pool. They become form into a column. The column marches, on, straight ahead, the figures become resolve themselves into a block, a wedge, individuals are and you can no longer recognizable, make out individual men, the just this dark wedge, wedge presses pushing onward, forwards, fantastically topped made even more strange by the heads and the weapons rifles bobbing floating along on the milky pool. misty lake. A column – not men. at all.”
Publication: Are You Experienced? Black Dog Publishing, 2015. Edited by Melissa Bennett, includes essay on Hadley+Maxwell's work, “Backstage in the phantasmagoria,” by Jennifer Fisher & Jim Drobnick.
In the video titled I, a dancer head bangs non-stop for the entire epic recording of "I" by Meshuggah. Only the shadows of the dancer are filmed, cast by red, green and blue light on the wall of the studio to express the potential of physicality to transcend affective histories of discipline.