For a solo commission, as part of the 'Look Again' 2017 festival in Aberdeen, we proposed an intervention to make an exhibition from the Robert Gordon University collection: to re-hang selected life paintings; re-interpreting the tradition of the nude in a provocative installation.
In the resulting installation, 'Re-Hang', in Gray's School of Art, all the selected life paintings were hung upside-down. This inversion of the nudes objectified them in a different way, making the viewer indeed look again.
The images potentially become more sexual, violent, confrontational, unnerving, abstract...
Points of contact in the paintings - eg. between body parts and furniture or fabric - become sites of tension; hands grabbing on for dear life. Suspended in limbo, fighting against gravity, held before the fall.
We're also interested in the viewer's vantage point - especially emphasised in such a specific hang, in relation to a gallery space, situated on two floors, around a stairwell.
[We have worked with inverted images (of bodies, body parts) on a number of occasions including, 'Godforsaken Hole / Free Hand' (1999, double black & white video installation on inverted 3x4m screens + amplified sound, looped) made for the Beckett Festival at the Barbican & exhibited in the Curve Gallery. Two inverted projection screens were bolted to the ceiling, turning the entire gallery on its head. The videos were shot in infra-red: one showing an upside down mouth giving instructions and directions; the other showing an inverted hand blindly feeling its way around a dark room].
