Scape

The opening show for 2001 season offers the perfect opportunity to play out all the Space Odyssey references, which can be associated with this numerical moment. But this said it is not going to be an exercise in sci-fi monumentalism set against the deft tones of Richard Straus. Instead we are pleased to offer the second in a series of sound installations by New Plymouth artist David Clegg.

The first in this series, Nature Table, Anna Bibby Gallery (January, 2001), showed an interest in shaping or location sound in a gallery environment, this expanded on a concept which was first experiment with by the artist last year in his Professional Man project. In Professional Man Clegg set up a strange array of visual and audio cues for the audience to contemplate: gallery wall texts took the form of public street signage and short stories filtered into the gallery space throughout its public address system. Here information is laid out in set of standardised, objective, modernist texts while nondescript anecdotes with no name protagonists reinforce a state of subservient numbness