Ali McCann / Campus 2022 — Come search with us.
On Thursday, 6 September 2022, artist Ali McCann (Birrarungga/Melbourne) commenced her three-month residency, opening with the first instalment of her research project entitled Campus: A study of educational, domestic, and deep dark space (In perpetual flux) 2022 ('Campus 2022').
Comprising new photographic and video works, found images and objects, the project continues her longstanding inquiry into the constructed nature of photography and the possibilities of creating alternate visual and psychological realities.
This first instalment of the project is about research and ideas - a continuation of McCann's examination of the central theme of nostalgia.
In the exhibition space, finished artworks intersect ambiguously with found objects and images. Obsolete teaching aids, 1970s life science books, pages torn from discarded art magazines and materials from the classroom, studio and home (c1970s-1980s) serve as starting points for exploring colour, shape, form and space.
Ali's practice is as much about formalism, materiality and visual perception as it is about the aesthetics of pedagogy/teaching and her nostalgia for the objects and imagery once used to facilitate learning and understanding of the self.
As her residency continues, she will create new works that extend her inquiries and expand the mode of her artistic field to encompass moving image, sound, sculpture, and performance.
The project will build to its culmination in a special exhibit and event to be presented in November, what Ali describes as:
A symbolic constellation of apophenia, or what the German psychiatrist Klaus Conrad describes as an "unmotivated seeing of connections (accompanied by) a specific feeling of abnormal meaningfulness.
This central idea of apophenia is the artist's focus during this first project stage. More specifically, the phenomenon of pareidolia.
Apophenia can be understood as the human tendency to seek connections/patterns in random information. Pareidolia is the more specific visual tendency to see familiar objects or patterns that might otherwise be unrelated.
It might interest you to understand that 'face pareidolia' – the phenomenon of seeing faces in everyday objects – uses the same brain processes we use to recognise and interpret other 'real' human faces.
So, this tendency to find patterns derives from real/lived experience. But often, such patterns only reveal themselves when we allow our minds to wander in reverie. In this first exhibit, we invite you to do exactly that.
To wander and seek out visual connections in the space - between the images, objects and materials that draw from the artist's imaginal world and life experience of the educational, the domestic and deep dark space.
Some connections you might share with the artist. Or, you might find other unique patterns that draw from your life experience and way of seeing.
We have provided insights into the images and objects in the room below to get things started. Walk through the images at your own pace, and then join us on-site.
We'd love to know what connections you find and how this discovery made you feel. When you visit us, you can leave an anonymous note in our visitor book. You can also leave questions or comments for the artist.
To read a fascinating interview with the artist conducted as part of an earlier correspondences' project entitled A Room with a View, press the hyperlink.
RSVP via the button below to join McCann's artist talk on 8 October 2-3 pm. Participation is free.
Thank you to Katherine Benjamin for taking many of the lovely installation shots below.
Bohr II 2022, Single channel video (still detail) © Ali McCann
In 2020, Ali made the video work entitled Bohr in connection with an earlier correspondences’ project entitled A Room with a View. The project explored everyday being and ritual - the creative impulse and the role of the home in shaping and nurturing our sense of self – alongside the demands of working or caring for loved ones at home during the pandemic.
This earlier work was a poetic imagining of Ali’s home and studio at this time - and more besides. The title references the work of Niels Henrik David Bohr, the Nobel Prize-winning Danish physicist who made foundational contributions to understanding atomic structure and quantum theory. In particular, the breakthrough understanding of the way that electrons move around a nucleus in prescribed orbits.
Installation shot Bohr II 2022, Single channel video (still detail) © Ali McCann
In Campus 2022, McCann presents Bohr II 2022, an iteration of the earlier work that adopts an aerial viewpoint and focuses more explicitly on the orbital movement of the spheres depicted. She has also integrated selected sounds and images from Jean-Michel Jarre's iconic 1976 album, Oxygene.
For those who came of age during the late 70s and 1980s, the subtle homage to the opening scenes of Jarre performing Oxygene Part 4 is a nostalgic reminder of youth, the futuristic vibes of the synthesiser revolution of the day and the 1980s in general, a decade of technological advancement and new age music and thinking. *
Together with these changes and other careful edits, Ali has created a subtle shift in the earlier work to cultivate a deeper sense of the strange, uncanny and occult, which can also be felt elsewhere in the exhibit.
*Jarre performed it on the popular Dutch Music show 'Top Pop' in 1977.
Installation shot Untitled 1 2022, Digital type-c print © Ali McCann
The photograph Foyer (After Maar and Matter) 2022 was shot as one of the starting points for Campus 2022. In the early 2000s, McCann obtained a collection of Super 8mm film footage from her old high school in Stawell (then Stawell Technical School), where she made art and her mother taught. Shot by students in the mid-late 1970s, the footage features the art room and its teenage students goofing around alongside teaching aids and student artworks. For Ali, it's a document rich with nostalgic energy.
The form depicted in Foyer (After Maar and Matter) 2022 is based on sculptures by the students from the art room in the footage. The backdrop is a press shot of the Stawell gold mine, which has latterly been converted into the 'Stawell Underground Physics Lab'. This pioneering project aims to host the Southern Hemisphere's first-ever direct-detection dark matter experiment (a significant step toward providing a fundamental theory of nature).
Aside from playing into her long-standing fascination with space and the intersections between art and science, the mine is also a site of nostalgia for Ali. Her childhood home was adjacent to the mine. She recalls her house shaking during mining excavations, the world and her domestic space alive with a deep, dark sense of magic/potential that emanated from the earth far below.
Installation shot Untitled 2 2022, Digital type-c print © Ali McCann
Like Foyer (After Maar and Matter) 2022, this photograph, Reclining figure on Rubin Ridge 2022, was shot as one of the starting points for this Campus 2022. The form depicted draws from the same super 8 footage of the Stawell College art room from the 1970s. This time, however, the backdrop is Vera Rubin Ridge on planet Mars, named after the pioneering American astronomer Vera Rubin - whose early work provided the first evidence for the existence of dark matter.
The forms that Ali has sculpted in this work, and Foyer (After Maar and Matter) 2022, also reference the work of English artist and sculptor Barbara Hepworth and French photographer, painter and poet Dora Maar, whose practices have influenced her. Like Rubin, they, too, were pioneering artists and thinkers in their fields.
Installation shot Diminished Knowledge 2018, Patinated bronze © Ali McCann Finalist 2019 Woollahara Small Sculpture Prize.
The bronze sculpture Diminished Knowledge 2018 sits in the window. The work references Ali’s teaching aids from the classroom. Found objects, in the form of obsolete teaching aids, unfinished student projects and discarded art materials, serve as departure points for explorations of colour, shape, form and space. The artwork is as much about formalism, materiality and visual perception as it is about the aesthetics of pedagogy/teaching and Ali’s nostalgia for the objects and imagery once used to facilitate learning.
Installation shot Diminished Knowledge 2018, Patinated bronze © Ali McCann
Ali writes, 'I am interested in the parallels between the lost-wax casting process (cere perdue) and analogue photography; the alternating inversions of form and image (positive to negative to positive…) and the alchemical interactions of these processes'.
In the rear studio space, you will find the cast for Diminished Knowledge 2018, which illuminates McCann’s words above. Despite now being an artefact of the making process, the cast is a beautiful object to be appreciated in and
of itself.
Installation shot Found object - Irregular prism
This irregular prism is an inverted vase. Ali's partner found it to be reminiscent of her bronze works, such as Diminished Knowledge 2018. He picked it up at an op shop.
Installation shot Found image - Ice skaters & found/inherited books - Matter, The Universe and The Cell
The image of two ice skaters torn from an old magazine depicts Torvill and Dean (Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean), the iconic English ice dancers and former British, European, Olympic and World Champions. Their 1984 Olympics performance was one of the most-watched television events in recorded history. If you look around, you might discover other visual connections or associations with the art of dance and the history of human forms and movement.
Matter, The Universe and The Cell were published between 1963 and 1967 by the Life Science Library, the book marketing division of Time Incorporated, that became a household name thanks to its innovative direct-to-consumer business model that meant the series was mailed to consumers each month. These much-loved editions belonged to Ali’s maternal; grandfather, an avid amateur photographer (and taxi driver).
Installation shot Found object - Bronze sculpture of ice skaters/dancers
McCann found this sculpture in an op shop, and it ended up being the main subject for her artwork, ’Tanya’ 2019, which was presented as part of her exhibition Οι νεοί at Gertrude Contemporary in Melbourne. The sculpture might call to mind the image of the iconic English ice dancers and former British, European, Olympic and World Champions Torvill and Dean, torn from a magazine and placed elsewhere in the room. Or something altogether different for you.
Installation shot Found object - Metallic stand
This metallic stand is another artefact from the art classroom. It bears traces of its regular use – years of dried clay on its surface. Ali rescued it from the classroom rubbish bin because it reminded her of one that her Mum used in her ceramics studio at home, which she used for making hand-built vessels.
Installation shot Found object - Metallic apple
Like the stand it sits beside in the exhibit, this metallic apple likewise bears traces of its regular use in the art classroom and studio. The object has appeared in several of Ali's artworks that are yet to be fully realised. But she keeps returning to it because it reminds her of 1980s home interiors. In particular, it calls to mind a childhood friend's home, full of kitschy, glittery 80s objects she loved and coveted as a child - the aesthetic of her own family home was full of simple, earthy tones.
Installation shot Found image - 'Space Age Fantasy’ girl
The image of the ‘Space Age Fantasy’ girl, as she is affectionately known, is a page torn from an old art textbook pinned to Ali’s studio wall for years. As the caption of the image notes, it's a costume design modelled by students from Berwick High School (c. the late 1980s/early 90s). It’s a wonderful image that references Ali’s long-standing fascination with deep dark space and science fiction. In a way, it is also a symbol imbued with a marvellous sense of female energy and power, befitting of this project’s exploration of an important constellation of path-breaking women in the arts and sciences.
Installation shot Print of found/inherited slide from Grandfather
This image of a mysterious-looking little creature is a slide reproduction of a ‘shield shrimp’ (T. australiensis ), taken by Ali’s paternal grandfather, an avid photographer and naturalist. Ali was gifted her grandfather’s meticulous slide collection of Australian flora and fauna. Commonly found in central Australia, in desert or arid country, where it is hot and dry, shield shrimp spawn when it rains in pools, drainage ditches, freshwater lakes and dams. Just as dried-up brine shrimp eggs are sold as ‘sea monkeys’, T. australiensis are sold in pet shops as a powder that can be brought to life with water. She has long been fascinated with this little prehistoric being and its friendly little 'human-like' face.
Installation shot Found photograph - Potter at work
This picture came from an old pottery book. It reminded Ali of her mother's hands on the potter's wheel at work. Ali's mother was a passionate teacher and an accomplished artist like her. If you look closely, you might notice a slightly comical-looking face in the clay.
Installation shot Found/inherited slide & photograph - Grandfather & Mother's hands at work
When you look at the shield shrimp image alongside the image of Ali’s mother’s hands at work, you might notice a connection, like Ali - that she also notices in Untitled 1 2022. Or, perhaps you notice something else altogether.
Installation shot Found image - Bronze sculpture
Tucked away elsewhere in the exhibit is an image of a bronze sculpture of two people running. McCann tore the image from a magazine in her studio. She can’t recall the name of the work, but its sense of movement spoke to her.
