Gazelli Art House is delighted to announce that Jane McAdam Freud will be giving a lecture on Object Authority at NYU as part of The Graduate Art Therapy Program on Thursday, March 16th, 6-8PM.
Please RSVP: art.assistant@gmail.com
Space is limited
NYU Barney Building Auditorium, 34 Stuyvesant Street, NYC
Artist’s Notes:
Object Authority
My recent works were made during my extended residency at the famous London school – Harrow. I am now half way through the residency which has been extended to two years. As the residency is housed in an educational setting it taps into my ambivalent relationship to authority, which is a complicated mixture of ‘awe’ and ‘rebellion’.
The works I have made are ‘site specific’ in that I intend for them to ‘speak’ from the history of objects housed at the school and about their status as pseudo instructors. In the context of authority and learning, implicit in school life, I consider selected functional objects found discarded on the premises. I am fascinated by those objects, which also contain their unspoken ‘instructional’ element. I look at the Freud’s theory of the ‘Thing’ and how we are affected by the image of the object on a pre-conscious and an unconscious level.
For example my works called SIT and STAND are not for sitting on, as they are broken chairs (un-obviously broken) and would collapse if sat on, but the image of the objects offers an instruction to the ‘impressionable’ viewer to sit for a moment. So SIT as an instruction is taken on through the image of the chair. It is of course also a description – a description of the function of the chair – a form on which to sit.
I have played with these objects as instructors and these words as descriptors. Other works in the series which follow this rule will come up during the presentation, although I have just as often broken the rules, as I say, having this ambivalent relationship towards authority, even my own.
