Hanging by a Thread exhibition at Alternating Currents Arts Space, High Street Windsor, February to March 2021
This installation is a response to the Population Ecology series of 35mm slides discovered while delving into the trove of AV material from the Marborough Secondary College in Victoria. This particular series explored seven different species and their adaptation to the environment. The seventh species was man. The distinguishing charateristic of man, so the lesson goes, is the extent to which he has adapted the evironment, rather than the other way around. This is such a profound and ingrained way of thinking and believing, that it must also affect our ability to perceive and see what is actually going on around us. Can we break out of this mode of belief?
The installation contains a 35mm slide projector showing the single slide Population case study no. 7, man on infinite repeat. The viewer is not alone, as the memory of past viewers is implied through the empty chairs – the whole piece reading as a fragment of a memory. Perhaps by looking at our past selves being taught this lesson, we can separate ourselves from the belief system that it perpetuates?
Paul Duldig 