LITMUS hosts New Plymouth-based artist David Clegg - the Massey University/Rita Angus visual artist-in-residence from 11 July to 6 August.
Using it concurrently as a site for the production and presentation of new work - David Clegg takes up office in the LITMUS research space 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 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.
Massey University's School of Fine Arts began its artist-in-residence programme in 2002. Working in tandem with the Thorndon Trust, caretakers of the Rita Angus Cottage, Massey has established an opportunity for significant visual arts practitioners, both here and overseas, to develop a particular body of work in situ in Wellington. The residency is research focused with the aim of enabling artists to concentrate on developing a particular strand of their practice.
The residency is now entering its fourth year. In that time it has hosted artists from Germany (Thomas Bayrle), England (Rachel Chapman) and New Zealand (Ronnie van Hout).
archivedestruct is open to the public during the period of its production, and is presented as an interactive installation in the LITMUS Research Space from 20 July - 5 August (Wednesday – Friday, 2 - 6pm).
For further information and/or images please contact Kate Griffin, LITMUS Project Director on tel: (04) 801 2794 extn: 6197 or email: k.a.griffin@massey.ac.nz.