This work is a temporary, multi-part, improvised installation, an assemblage made of two realities – physical and digital. The work makes fun of our propensity for barriers. This is a domestically scaled fence/barricade made from reclaimed and reconfigured furniture that is cleanly and endlessly extended by an Augmented Reality (AR) overlay made visible via the built-in cameras on the provided tablet.
Like walls, fences become more ineffectual as they move further from their typical vertical orientation. When compromised by gravity, they need to be propped up, provided with a crutch. Crossing this tipping point from resistance to gravity, they become doubly useless, their “wall-ness” is compromised and they are in the way.
Delineated borders/walls remain potential flash-points in communities all over, oftentimes highlighting a separation between public and private, between “haves” and “have-nots”, between “mine” and “yours”. For this ridiculous, seemingly animate work, there is nothing being kept out – there is no “here” being separated from “there”. Further, with the digital AR overlay, the threshold between the real and the virtual is questioned.
Getting in the way, recalibrating intentionally compromised forms and the implicit choreography of such actions became the central focus of my residency.
In its irregular capricious placement, its ineffectual source material, its semi-charred ruinous state, its never upright orientation, its submerging and emerging character, its intentional un-constructed/re-constructed methods, cumulatively this work strays far from utilitarian conventional barriers. The work is simultaneously a genuine and false ruin, its factual partial presence implying and extending into a virtual fictional whole. The work is a reminder of the transient nature of earthly pursuits.
http://matthewtalbotkelly.com/portfolio/concerning-the-inept/