Abstract
XX/XX/XXXX–XX/XX/XXXX explores moments of art-making practice contained within the heterotopic space of art encounter—a conflation of spaces ‘drawn out’ and ‘drawn together’. Studio methods relating to the miniature (as a rescaling device and a space in its own right), sculptural support structures (like pylons), tableau, and installation become devices for testing spectatorial reception, trembling demarcations and delimitations.
Initiated through studio practice and backgrounded by the literary theory of Susan Stewart, this project aims to build upon existing scholarship relating to sculptural practice, installation, and spectatorship, in the context of the under-theorised areas of the miniature and volatile states of reverie. Here, the miniature, through its operations of alignment, tableau, and island-like characteristics, is deployed as a means for complicating notions of encounter, temporality, and installative space. Notably, a variety of artworks occurring in 1:1 scale are examined via the operations of the miniature, creating a contribution to analysis of contemporary art in Aotearoa New Zealand and further afield.
Accumulative methodologies propose sticky, surface-laden, temporal accretions, attesting to the passage of the project over time, while articulating an event-space of art encounter and temporal spectatorship.
In the context of contemporary debates about activity/passivity, spectatorship/participation and antagonisms in art encounter, I offer a reconsideration of installation experience as a speculative and partially unknowable space, thus expanding conceptions of how art is encountered.
