Output details

The Foxes

The Foxes comprised an installation built around a video filmed in Peru. It arose from research into a collection of slides taken in 1973 by the social anthropologist Gavin A. Smith. These images were taken during his fieldwork in a highland village in Peru called Huasicancha. While the video touched on Smith’s original work on Peruvian land reform and tactics of peasant rebellion, its dominant focus was the general legibility of photographs, and the reading of images as discursive acts.

The other works presented included a mosaic floor piece of Victorian tiles, a collection of photographs and a set of curtains. In the floor piece the mosaic pattern was employed in such a way that it changed pattern across its repetitions. Due to its location in Venice, a city of many mosaics, and the references in the film to Peruvian tiling, this shifting of pattern suggested the migration of objects and styles across cultures and time.

Each photograph combined an original slide taken by Dr Smith with the same location photographed in the present. These images of different times were layered as either red, green or blue as is common to the structure of colour photographs. Through the coloured layering, things that had not changed over time appeared three dimensional while any differences between the images were manifested as colour separations.

The installation was accompanied by a 16-page catalogue with essays by Gavin A. Smith and Aaron Peck (ISBN 978-0-9558583-4-5). It was commissioned for Scotland + Venice 2013 by The Common Guild, Glasgow with the support of Creative Scotland, National Galleries of Scotland, British Council Scotland, Outset Contemporary Art Fund et al. The video was screened at the 57th BFI London Film Festival and the installation will be shown at The Common Guild in 2014. For more information see http://www.scotlandandvenice.com/