Portable Black Hole- Embassy Galleries Annuale
Posted by Tom Estes on Friday, October 19, 2012
Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art One- Tom Estes- Portable Black Hole, June 8th 2012 Remember the Road Runner Show? Simple in its premise, the Road Runner, a flightless cartoon bird, is chased down the highways of the south western United States by a hungry cartoon coyote, named Wile E. Coyote (a pun on "wily coyote"). Despite numerous clever attempts, and the use of a variety of ludicrous devices from that fictitious mail-order company ACME, Wile E. Coyote never catches or kills the Road Runner. But wouldn't it still be cool if there really was an ACME company? Inspired by The Road Runner Show Artist Tom Estes enters the realm of Loonytune physics to create a Live Art Guerrilla Action with a ‘Portable Black Hole’ from the darkest material ever made.
The carpet of carbon nano- tubes, on show at The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, reflects 0.045 percent light, making it 100 times darker than a black-painted Corvette according to researchers from Rice University, The Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and NASA. Estes work Portable Black Hole is part installation and part performance and functions according to shifting locations and contexts. The aim is to move the ‘Portable Black Hole’ around so that it is interspersed between the existing sculptures and the paintings of a museum collection. 'Portable Black Hole is intended as a visual metaphor for 'the disappeared'. The work is intended as a reminder of the multiple, idiosyncratic pockets of forgotten histories; of absence and the unseen and unrepresented; multiple conflicting realities that exist side by side with official or recorded ‘histories’.
On this occasion, Portable Black Hole is sited at The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art One, alongside sculptural works from the collection, and important works on loan a major new exhibition 'The Sculpture Show'. Featured artists include Rodin, Degas, Hepworth, Moore, Giacometti, Duchamp, Hirst, Lucas and others, along with photographic and film documentation and with Ron Mueck's enormous A Girl which returns to the Gallery from its world tour. As part of the work members of the audience and visitors to the museum are asked to take pictures of the performance on their own cameras or on a communal camera that is passed around. In this way the audience becomes not only involved with the documentation of the performance but part of the Live Art action. The pictures of the performance and the audience participation are published on social networking sites for another online audience to view. http://contemporaryartscotland.blogspot.co.uk/2012_05_01_archive.html
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As an artist I have always leaned toward making Live Art performance work that is participatory or immersive in some way. In my Live Art performance I stage an 'action' and then ask members of the audience to take pictures on a communal camera. In this way, the audience becomes part of the performance, and the pictures are then posted on on-line social networking sites and web sites for another, wider on-line audience.
For me, fantasy and illusion are not contradictions of reality, but instead an integral part of our everyday lives. There is a real Peter Pan Syndrome at play in my work and I suppose I would consider myself to be a carnival sideshow conceptualist, combining a bare-bones formal conceptualism with an eternally adolescent, prank DIY comic-approach.
At the core of this work is an attention to the flickering, fading definition of our lives as dictated by the computer monitor and the rapid reply of instant messaging. I strive, not to break down these introverted, often self-imposed boundaries, but to look at how dataflow from the virtual realm impacts on the significance and symbolism of real-world human senses. But in doing so, I have begun to generate unexpected questions about how art might be able to inscribe itself on the surface of reality- not to represent itself on the surface of reality –not to represent reality, nor to duplicate it, but to replace it.
