Wednesday 6 October 2010

Work-In-Progress documentation of "System" 2010 at Hackney Wickipedia, Hackney Wicked! Art Festival 2010

So,

Here is the recap with photo documentation of the work in progress for my installation called "System" which exhibited at a show with the Gadje Collective called Hackney Wickipedia as part of the Hackney wicked Art Festival 2010.

This is the day it began really, after talks and planning, we assembled at the pearly bar cafe place near Oslo House and then made our way to see the warehouse a week or so before the dates for the opening. Sydney, Uli and Roman are caught here as we entered Main Yard.

As we entered the warehouse, the space was overwhelming and there was an incredible feeling of excitement felt by us all. The floor hadn't been painted yet in this picture, but there is something also quite beautiful and photogenic about space, even when there isn't any work in it yet don'tya think?

Discussion started to occur. Other technical aspects to do with curation needed to be finalised still at this point. The electricians needed to put in lights and power supply was still limited.


When I was finally able to get in after the floors had been painted, I needed to crack on with preparing the cloud. Since the electricians were scheduled to fix lighting in later in the week, I could only work efficiently during daylight hours. Realising this problem, I created some lamps from light fittings/batten holders and plugged them in as it started to get a bit darker. Makeshift, very makeshift! Here you can see me glueing bits of plastic together to create a sort of bumpy wavey textured plastic sheet...


Every now and then I'd get up to investigate the other artists. Here is the gorgeous Sydney Southam working from her laptop, editing her video and shit! woop! Sydney recently won the Vice/Koppaberg Clash for her Ice Cream video which exhibited at Atmosphere in the Spectrum which I curated earlier this year.

I was blessed to have assistance with making this installation from James-Frederick Boman who had also greatly assisted me on my installation "Oil-Of-Course" earlier at the beginning of the summer. Since he lived locally in Bow, he was able to be there for two days. Once we had glued the sheet of plastic all together, we started to fill the cloud up placing loads more plastic over the sheet...

Here's me doing pretty much the same thing, stuffing the cloud up. Idea being is that eventually the sheet would fold over and form a large sealed cloud base.


I must also mention that I had assistance from Katarina Kelsey who again had assisted me with earlier proect. Where would I be without my fantastic helpers! Love! Here's us working together sealing up this giant thing that at this stage wasn't sure if it was a cloud at all??...ha!


The next day, I came into the space and had another look at the thing I'd made the night before and felt it looked more like a giant turd made out of plastic than anything else, (well actually I thought it looked like the fish water shape from a Dali painting but only I can probably see that) anyway I wasn't happy, it wasn't cloud-like enough...


I needed to make the cloud fluffy, or appear that way, I needed to make more tiny little clouds to assist this big thing. I had experimented looking at the overall shape on the ground and then got to work on ammending bits and making additional little clouds...

Meanwhile, James...


...and katie, did nothing at all but messed around BMXing all over the place! (it is really all fun and games when we work)!


Jus Kiddin! they helped loads!

Anyway, at this stage we couldn't hang the cloud as the electricians were still blimmin messing around with the times and schedule to put up the lights, and my cloud was to eventually be hung underneath the very place the wanted to place them. Instead we found other tasks to do whilst we could not go ahead with this main duty such as linking paper chains, yep, I know, great way to spend an afternoon, eh! Good times, Good times. Here and there, we had the radio until the builders took it...


And who says poor, starving, broke-ass, mother-flying artists don't eat! Well, thanks to Sydney, towards the end of the day, we were able. She unintentionally brought us some leftover scraps of risotto from some place she'd been earlier in brick lane! surprisingly really tastey!


Yeah, this is us...erm...and the risotto, erm... yeah!


Next day arrives and I've got my Kate Moss sexy nipple T-Shirt on! ready to start! but first I sit on the drop of death from where Helga, Mia and 'the found object collective' were preparing for their Wicked show! It's not so scary in reality looking down, but if you drop you know your leg or ankle or something is gonna pop or crunch hehe! err...


So in the morning the electricians had finally bunged in their super bright intense neon strip lights which were quite an eyesaw when I'd seen what they'd finally done. Nonetheless, I had to carry on with hanging the cloud before I would consult with the collective about the lighting issue. Here James and I battled with hanging the cloud/turd using the tower and ladder.


It does look like a turd. Here I tied it in different places to give it more of a strange sort of curve, and to make it more like some sort of creature. I guess I'm quite thankful for the Tower because it sure helped quite a bit. That's the benefit of working with Festival people and also having the local industrial people around to help make such cool tools available...


In between this and that I managed to help with other from the collective, such as the lovely Alix Marie. She needed assistance with glueing some of her photographs up onto the walls with the glue gun...


James got on with helping me by glueing fishnet wire cut at different lengths to all the copper and silver coins which would then be hung onto the cloud. In fact, whilst he glued them together, I was busy tieing them up on the cloud...


Eventually the results were looking pretty good even in the neon light above. At least it looked less like a turd and more like some wild cloud beast monster thing that was all encompassing! A little bit further up in the space...


...the beautiful Tonga Schneider was getting a little dirty in the mud for her work! We all sorta rushed in snapping up photos at the sight of her semi naked doing this bizarre thing laying down creating silhouettes in the earth! documenting...of course... Anyway, it seemed almost like a ritualistic performance of some sort with Helene Butler working the earth around her!


Eventually, as the hours drifted later into the night, I had put up all the money, (including a few 50p coins which I noticed had been nicked by the end of the show haha!) and I had managed to place most of my little figurines down carefully and attached each of their chains to them and to the cloud.

The finished documentation of the work at the show is available to see at my webiste, www.theleocohen.com

Until next post... x

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