This project was inspired by an interview I was fortunate enough to carry out with artist Gayle Chong Kwan, back in 2007. I remember being struck by her apparent fascination for people, their experiences, the notion of community in art, and the act of bringing people together through her projects. Her work at that time was heavily based on audience participation, and I was intrigued by the way that her emerging works were often guided or determined by participants' responses, rather than predetermined outcomes by herself as an artist.
The project began over the 2020 Easter weekend, a break which for many was spent indoors, at home, due to the Covid 19 pandemic. Participants were asked where they would choose to spend the weekend, if they could have been anywhere of their choice. A hundred and ten people responded with photographs and, or written descriptions, most of which fell loosely into categories such as; past holiday destinations, peaceful places near home, special times gone by, dreams of future trips and simply remaining in one’s own location.
The responses varied not only in relation to place, but also in terms of how much each participant stated about their choice. Some provided little more than the location’s name, others shared personal memories or described emotional reactions to the question, with many entries falling somewhere between the two. The project started out without a designated outcome, which was instead determined later in the project, after the entries had been received, and in direct reaction to them. The project eventually resulted in two distinct works which have been outlined below.
Wish You Were Here (2020)
Wish You Were Here is a photo-collage, created on Photoshop using all one hundred and seven images, as sent in by participants. The idea behind this was to bring all of the entries together to create one imaginary world, or landscape. On this basis, the piece could be described as a landscape build from the participants’ wishes and dreams.
The medium in this collage became the digital images themselves, and while some images have remained fully in tact, others have been manipulated and worked into, with modifications such as resizing, reshaping, recolouring, being cut into or cut up, parts being taken away or covered up by neighbouring images, sections being blurred away and patterns or shapes being cloned and repeated. The result is that some participants will see their own photo clearly, whereas others will see only a part of their image. Likewise, some images will be more clearly visible than others.
The resulting landscape was placed onto a post-card styled background, bearing the caption ‘Wish You Were Here!”. This caption became the title of the piece, derived from the post-card cliché, whilst also alluding to the participants wishes themselves.
One Hundred and Ten Memories of the Future (2020)
One Hundred and Ten Memories of the Future is a short-film, approximately 25-minutes in length, comprising of a brief introduction followed by four individual journeys, shorter sections of the films in which smaller groups of entries are presented in their own time and space. The film was edited using Final Cut Pro.
Each of the four journeys have been set against their own piece of music, and possess their own pace, rhythm and dynamic. While each journey could be considered a self-contained experience, the journeys are also interconnected, guiding the viewer on a tour around the responses, wishes, and dreams as shared by the participants. While Wish You Were Here only brings together the visual image entries of which there are one hundred and seven, this film incorporates the participants’ written descriptions too.
The four pieces of music from the journeys all contain a piano melody, but differ in terms of composer and genre, each of which are credited at the end of the film. The music from Journey One “we were froots”, from her album “The Hunter of Small Happinesses (2017)” was kindly donated by a participant of the project, composer Mix Amylo, whose photo entry appears at the very end of Journey One.