East, London
Richard Aldrich
Remembering Childhood
Modern ArtI found this group of my old slides in a slide box, which in and of itself was not that odd — often I find collections in sheets or boxes, but generally it is not hard to deduce what I was thinking when I grouped them. But this set was very all over the place, including early sculptures from school in the mid 90s to a favourite small painting from 2004. Early on we realised a slide projector was not going to work in the gallery space. The image was just too washed out given the distance I wanted from the wall (and for a show that runs through June) so we switched to a digital projector. Though interestingly, I realised through the various attempts with different projectors that a big part of my interest in the slides was the sound it makes and how this would coexist with the Harry Pussy soundtrack. So this lead me to thinking maybe the best way to think about time and memory is with these different time schedules. Knowing that a digital projector can be programmed for whenever, in this case some of the images lasting for up to twenty minutes, versus the static 5 second viewing of the slides. Using both, particularly in two separate locations, felt like an interesting way to describe the non-linear way in which memories from the past exist. There was a past show that I did with the working title ‘There is no such thing as time in the unconscious’. This, I think, is true. Four Near Identical Figures comes from a mashing up of an iPhone-made digital collage, an image of an outfit of Shiv from Succession, some of my mother’s crafts hanging on a wall in my parents’ house, and other things! I often do not like making up compositions, so taking things from other sources helps with that and also determines colour so that I can focus more on just the painting. Untitled comes from a previous painting that was on my normal size of 82 x 53 inches wide, but stretched out onto a 82 x 68 inch canvas. How do you expand that? How do expand anything? In this case I made some of the shapes larger and added some extra shapes. In the end it became more a cousin of the original rather then a conceptual process strategy, but that gesture was never meant to be an end, but rather a start. Of late, I like to think of my work as more philosophical rather than conceptual, even though I imagine in the artworld both of these words have been rendered meaningless. How do we live our lives? How do we make decisions? What, in the end is important to us? What are our biases? When and how do we make judgements, be they positive or negative? I hope that my work embodies and makes crystalline the process of a more ephemeral/ethereal decision making. What is it to make a painting, what is it to show a painting? In a physical show, within a community of fellow artists, in the time of a hyper-commercialised market... What are the emotional relationships one has within this venture? Who plays such an integral role that you could not imagine doing it without them, who do you disdain, and who is just another in a throng of people that are around?