Store_Blp is a new site-specific installation made at Articulate to help work out relationships site specific artworks could have with their (live) site while the artworks are dormant (uninstalled). It has three main elements: the moveable material remnants of multiple site specific artworks; photographs showing them installed (available to visitors using their phones to access a website); and the site present firstly as the place of Articulate itself, and secondly as a floor drawing of a blp, which was used by its inventor, artist Richard Artschwager, as a pointer to ‘here’ to help us notice where we are. The plan is that the three interact over the duration of the exhibition—starting with the floor drawing storing the remnants, the remnants marking out the blp and the photos showing how components were mixed in the past. Essays speculating on Artschwager’s blp usage will also be available.
Store_Blp is open 11am – 5pm Fri-Sun 29 April – 15 May 2022 or by arrangement by texting 0425277462. Opening event: Sat 30 April 2-5pm. Artist’s talk: Sat 7 May 2-3pm.
Articulate project space is at 497 Parramatta Road Leichhardt 2040. articulateprojectspace.org
Artist Statement
Store_Blp is the latest in 30 years of making site-specific artworks. I realized my attraction to working with site specificity came from its advocacy for place through the role its artworks give to their own physical locations—making them models for how people can also value the places we live in. Actually it’s a model for the globalised Western culture in particular, as Indigenous cultures care for Country as a matter of course.
Blps do something similar to site-specificity because their inventor, artist Richard Artschwager discovered they help make us aware of the presence of the place that we share with the blp. Blps might also help with the documentation of site specific art by supplementing photography with an ambiguous sign for the presence of the places they are photos of. The next blp project is Wayout_Blp, planned for 2023 in Kandos, in the Central West of NSW. It invites residents of the Central West to lend an object they live with to lay out on the floor in a shape of a large blp to demonstrate their communal regard for ‘here’.
Margaret Roberts, April 2022
https://articulateprojectspace.org/