Let me now speak of the exhibition I used these for: I found the images so interesting that I decided that I would exhibit the images as part of a joint show at a gallery. For this I decided to frame the images ready for the wall and also left an abstract by the work, telling the viewer that I was an artist who enjoyed using found media for my exhibitions. Normally in cases of such found imagery I do not know my contributor, however, in this case not only did I know the maker, she was in fact related to me and lived locally. How did this affect my view on the exhibition? To start with the work did not feel like my work, it felt however that I was curating the work for another. I wondered if this was because I felt guilt at using someone else’s images as my artwork. Being an artist who has used found images before I am used to knowing how to justify my decisions to use found pieces. This generally involves mentioning Marcel Duchamp, Richard Prince and Tacita Dean. I find examples like these artists can cover my back a little; think of it as “well they were doing it first”. Surely then it was just the proximity and knowledge of the image-maker that I had some issue with.
What did come from the exhibition was an unseen reward for my efforts as an artist, not only did I get another show under my belt, my mother realised her first exhibition in a public gallery. An exhibition that was very unlikely to come to her [mainly as she has never desired to show any work in such a context]. My mother did however see value in this and enjoyed seeing her work being exhibited, even if it was not entirely clear why I wanted to exhibit them so much.
From these images I found four rather small [about 2 inch square], black and white images. They appeared to be landscapes; the first was of a large building resembling a large American college, two more seemed to be of Airport exteriors, both of which had large planes that took up most of the focus of the images and the third appeared to be a Bavarian street. All of which individually would perhaps of not raised many questions, however together they became quite the enigma. Why would one of my parents be taking images of these scenes? To be more precise how could this of come about? I then started to question the angle of the photographs all of which were taken from a high angle looking down on each scene. How could this be so? Were they taken from a plane, a large hill? What was I really seeing in these images? After further study I started to notice that the people that appeared in the images were not at the right perspective, they were giant and some of the trees as well could not appear smaller in the foreground than they were in the background. It was then there, available to me, the answer was the fact that these were miniatures. I had been viewing a model village as if it were a real one and if it wasn't for the clues I would never of known. After speaking with my mother it became absolutely apparent that I had been tricked by my mother into seeing something in a different way and not only my mother, but my mother at the age of about ten on a school trip to Holland where she visited this model village. How strange it was to be tricked or deceived so long after the actual event.