archivedestruct: New Plymouth
Govett-Brewster Art Gallery
13 May - 11 June, 2006

David Clegg takes up office at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery with his interdisciplinary project archivedestruct. Presented as an interactive installation in continual flux, archivedestruct is open to the public throughout the period of its making.

Using text, image and audio materials collected daily from Wellington's urban spaces, Clegg processes his data as printed matter and audio CDs – offering these in the form of an open-ended and flexible archive.

Rather than accepting the accuracy or factual value of the archive, Clegg's project exposes the unreliability of evidence – playing on the capacity of records to simultaneously inform and mislead, to locate and misguide. Offering unusually wide margins for translation, archivedestruct provides users with an actively expanding grid of information through which real and fictive itineraries or narratives may be plotted.

'In specific reference to the Buckle Street building and its earlier use as the Museum of New Zealand, the archivedestruct project will also take its impetus from the work collection (disorders) 1994 which I made for the exhibition Art Now in a space adjacent to the LITMUS office. But whereas that work addressed the archive through the body (both individual and corporate) and its disorders, the archivedestruct project will attempt to engage with issues of relative location and problems arising from the transfer of information between moving bodies.'

David Clegg has exhibited widely in New Zealand and abroad since the 1980s. His most recent project The Imaginary Museum (www.imaginarymuseum.com) was a major audio-visual installation series bringing into focus the built environment of gallery space. Combining recorded commentaries from the directors, curators and staff of selected international contemporary art museums with associated photographic materials – the work invited visitors to assemble an 'imaginary museum' from sound, image, text and spatial fragments. The Imaginary Museum was presented at Christchurch Art Gallery, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth and the Adam Art Gallery, Wellington.