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‘Horizontal Ontologies: One + One (The Reading) and Vexations’ was a solo exhibition that included two works using visual documentation of extended performance activities as the basis of their form. ‘Vexations’ is comprised of 840 A3 digital photographs of the artist making a huge wall drawing reflecting on the process of learning to play on piano Eric Satie’s enigmatic 1893 score of the same title, completed in January 2008 as part of a residency at Sheffield Site Gallery. ‘One + One (The Reading)’ was a single screen version of the video tryptych originally produced for the touring exhibition ‘One + One’. The AC Institute is a privately funded gallery in Chelsea, New York, specialising in experimental, cross-art form and performative practice.

‘Horizontal Ontologies: One + One (The Reading) and Vexations’ sits alongside the revival of live performance in contemporary art and the recuperation of the ‘performance-to-screen’ strategies used by artists in the politicised artwork of the late 1960s and 1970s. In combination with increasingly sophisticated ‘scenographic’ and narrative approaches to exhibition display, particularly incorporating video, alongside relational and socially-engaged practice, this has created what Rosalind Krauss termed a new ‘expanded field’. Subjectivity gains renewed agency, opposing the alienation and individualism of global capitalism. These ‘affective’, critical and often collaborative modes of practice form the context for this exhibition.

McLeer uses a complex model of documentation and appropriation to address subjectivity within the languages and forms of representation. She co-opts the ‘figure’ of the artist as an image or sign that stands for subjective modalities, rather than simply being a document of the artist herself.

‘Vexations’ was initiated as a live ‘Site Platform’ commission for Site Gallery, Sheffield. It culminated in January 2008 as an installation of 840 digital photographs and a live performance by two musicians of a vast new visual score. McLeer’s invited paper on the context for the work, titled ‘I have drawn away, I have not left my place’ was published in Building Material 19, 2009 by Architects Association of Ireland. For this exhibition, a selection of the images has been installed in response to the different space to create a spatial scene of multiple figures that undermine the individual viewer.

Alex Hetherington was commissioned to write an essay on ‘Vexations’ for Site, and McLeer contributed to a symposium on performative and participatory strategies at Site in Oct 2008. In 2013 Site organised a group show of all the artists in the series (including Turner Prize winner Elizabeth Price): ‘Platform, In the Making’, to re-launch the commission programme.