Image, installation, time: the spatial articulation of the image in the context of expanded fine art practices

Abstract

The spatiality of installation practice fused with the chimeric and multiple temporalities inherent to digital exposition, suggests a further expansion of the image, inviting a wholly artistic and practice-based response to this partially mapped territory. This research explores strategies for an artistic practice that engage with the material conventions of the image while orienting these modalities to the spatial articulation of subjectively experienced, psychological time in the context of digital media space, process and exposition. This research closely observes the role of painting and the photograph within the macro-ecology of the exhibition-form responding to the question of how these practices are oriented within the time-space proposed by newly emerging digital and social contexts.

Fundamentally, this research proposes the question when is installation as opposed to where. Particular emphasis was given within practice-based processes to subjective phenomena, guided by speculative methods concerning intuition and providence concerning literature research, with acausal overlapping phenomena emphasised in the context of material practice. Strategies were formulated into a highly individuated autoethnographic methodology, producing temporal objects available for reflexive scrutiny and exposition as artefact. The material residue of this process in the form of photographs, personal notes and collected literature coalesce around the recreation of a single painting, the provenance of which is the subject of debate and speculation.

The implications for installation practice in the context of a global pandemic presented the necessity for a radical reappraisal of methods. This urged the question of what role digital exposition and the image has in this context. While enduring questions of document and artefact provided theoretical context, new reflexive tools were developed to examine the material and social context of the exhibition form, the role of painting, and the waning indexicality of the photographic image, such that digitisation and the simulated object act critically upon the various strata of practice and exposition.

The reflexive, digitally projected, virtual-object is one method of spatial hypothesis and lens upon the temporal strata of artistic practice enveloping architecture and image. The form of exhibitionary display presented by this thesis, through conjecture sufficiently proposes its own sitedness, may attend to its own style, and infuse with its footprint while being absent of any media whatever. As with other axiomatic structures along the expanded continuum, it is presented at this moment, as a transitional object absent of teleological concern, suggestive only of other territories.

Date of Award	Oct 2021
Original language	English
Supervisor	Dougal McKenzie (Supervisor), Mary Mc Intyre (Supervisor) & Karen Fleming (Supervisor)