Headphone

Headphone is an installation of various media. Violet Faigan uses sound to activate the gallery space via a strategically placed microphone.

Recent work by Faigan at the Dunedin Public Gallery elicited the following comments from Dr Chris McAuliffe, Director of the Ian Potter Museum of Art in Melbourne, Australia.

What Faigan does with the materials that she has acquired can be described as a form of bricolage. This term popularised by the French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss. refers to activity that transfers an object from one system of use and meaning to another. These often incongruous acts of relocation are characterised as acts of improvisation, a kind of tinkering that disregards the 'natural' of the 'correct' meaning of the object. Migrating from anthropology to sociology and cultural studies, bricolage has become a term referring to the ways in which subcultural groups construct their own symbolic 'Field Work and Found Objects'. 

Dr Chris McAuliffe

In 2001 Violet Faigan participated in the Dunedin Public Gallery's Visiting Artists Programme, the culmination of which was the body of work form which Dr McAuliffe's comments are drawn.
 

Violet Faigan was born in Timaru in 1970. She began exhibiting paintings in 1998, and is shown widely in New Zealand and Australia.