A
Diary, some Keys and New York City - video - 60 mins - 2002
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A Diary, some Keys and New York City uses small mundane objects that are seemingly without resonance and embeds them in the matrix of a text written over three months in NYC. A sort of Proustian madeleine strategy, but somewhat reversed. Rather than the object and sensation bringing back the past, here it is more as if the past has washed these artifacts into the present, choreographing them, but at the same time meeting a mute resistance. As a youth I had a great fascination with archeology, and would field walk, finding bits of pot or charcoal or other scraps of living. When you hold these objects in your hand you become painfully aware of how much of their narrative cannot be retrieved, that vast aching history that cannot be recuperated or known, they can now only be articulated in different orderings of use or presumed utility. The objects in the tape flicker between different fugitive states in that dark gap.
From catalogue statement - A
Diary, a History, a Walk up the Hill - Experimental Art Foundation,
Adelaide.