Sean Loughrey

Natural Selections

Press release / Catalogue text

A Video Installation by Sean Loughrey 200

This work is part of an ongoing series of works which unite elements of the 'natural' world with technological structures. These works are sculptural in that they are physically adapted objects that spatially relate to objects in a prescribed space, including windows, doors and other architectural features. The video footage experiments with the depiction of common animal characters from the 'natural' world, locally.

On this occasion five monitors are placed together in a line on the floor, each monitor depicting fish swimming simultaneously. The monitors are green, monochromatic overall, placed on the floor in a line like a fish pond with the fish all swimming in the same direction. Another monitor depicting a magpie, is placed high like a nest. There is no prescribed narrative.

This work alludes to objectively replicating a 'natural' world including the viewer as an integral/interactive part of the work.

Video still, 2003

A space between cornice and dado

Natural Selections, as an Ocular Lab project, pointedly highlights the indifference of the space traditionally referred to as somewhere between heaven and earth and in this instance, between cornice and dado. As an architecturally aligned project, it proposes an exacting location between two diametrically opposed notions of human operatives, freedom and imprisonment. While both bird and fish appear within contrived spaces of their own, they alternately profuse an abundance of factual and mythical resonance with sport and religion. As one subscribes to geographical and linguistic folklore, the other is the embodiment of subservience to an organised, unwavering and predictable movement of its own. As traditional belief systems ascribe to notions of height and piety, abject space between cornice and dado is a sight of deep concern but potentially a point of great relief. Natural Selections, on one of many intermediate levels of speculation, almost completely effaces the practice of artifice in search of common discursive dialogues. Freedom as expressed by bird life, and imprisonment as portrayed by fish are non other than a symbolic mutiny, implicating the politics of both height and piety in the structural damage of definitive ideologies. Alternatively, the space in between, by the nature of its geographic historicity, is in turn, non other than a meeting place.

Raafat Ishak

November 2003