Graduating Show as a Requirement of the Masters of Fine Arts | Randolph Street Exhibition Space
January 2007

For me, the Foodtown supermarket checkout line contains a singular joy: a little readout sign on the till that states ‘Tender Validation’.  It is an embodiment of the slipperiness of words, a silly but charming play on a phrase.  The little L.E.D. sign slips and struggles endlessly between its service requirements and what it hopes to be: perhaps, a tender and caring validation between lovers.  All through the years, that little sign has never lost its magic.  Here, the act of reading is utterly confounded.  I am delighted by the idea that these two little words have not atrophied on that L.E.D. sign, that they dance and struggle between differing meanings, deferring a decisive meaning.

The Works

Twenty20 International: New Zealand v Australia at Auckland, 17 February 2005: New Zealand 159/7, 19th over

“It is a curious fact that novelists have a way of making us believe that luncheon parties are invariably memorable for something very witty that was said, or for something very wise that was done. But they seldom spare a word for what was eaten.” (Woolf, 1929)

A reconstruction of the wicket in the over bowled by Brett Lee to Scott Styris with Jeff Wilson the non-facing batsman.  The stumps are true to scale at 711mm, with the scale of the players and the perspective of the pitch determined around the stumps.  The width of the paper is 2.64m – the width of a wicket.  The bottom edge of the paper is decided through the approximated position of the batting crease, as it relates to the stumps.

Museum Collection

“Each sheet of paper has, built into it, the history of the movements of that sequence … What the technique itself does, is have some sense of a passage of time, of process, of progression” (Kentridge as cited in Wulf, 1999).

Twenty-one, 1,000 piece jigsaw puzzles from the Clementoni Museum Collection – each depicting paintings by European artists dating from the fifteenth century to the twentieth century – have been put together, and then broken down into tiles of three by three pieces.  These are then reinstalled on the wall using, the Golden Ratio’s numerical decimal sequence as a means of randomly selecting each tile’s position.  The principle of the Golden Ratio, however, is not used.

The Good, The Bad and The Ugly: “The Contest”, Scene 41

“The other of the signified is never contemporary, is at best a subtly discrepant inverse or parallel – discrepant by the time of a breath – of the order of the signifier”. (Derrida, 1976, p. 18).

Using Sergio Leonie’s The Good, The Bad and the Ugly, (starring Clint Eastwood as ‘The Man With No Name’, or the Good, Lee Van Cleef as Angel Eyes, or the Bad and Eli Wallach as Tuco Benedicto Pacifico Juan Maria Ramirez, or the Ugly) every sixth split second of the penultimate standoff at ‘Sadhill Cemetery’ is captured as a still image.  The 625 still images are then reconfigured into separate films of each character.  The projected films approximate where each character stood within the scene at Sadhill Cemetery as they eye each other across the circular centre of the graveyard.

Photographs by Nathaniel J. Cooke

Derrida, Jacques. (1976). Of Grammatology. (Gayatri C. Spivak, Trans.). Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press. (Original work published in 1967).

Woolf, Virginia. (1929). A Room of One’s Own.

Wulf, Reinhard (Director). (1999). William Kentridge: Drawing the Passing. [Motion picture]. David Krut Publishing.