WHEN : 1st – 4th Feb / Opening 2nd Feb, 5:00 -7:00pm
WHERE : The Block
In his practice, Christopher Handran engages with apparatuses that mediate perception and experience.
By subjecting their operations to a series of playful and do-it-yourself interventions, Handran foregrounds the apparatus, as much as the images it produces or presents, as a site for experience. His works employ everyday materials and subjects, re-enacting the sense of invention that characterised early photography and film.
Handran’s practice-led research explores the apparatus as both a theoretical framework and as a practice methodology. This engagement with the apparatus constitutes a particular model of spectatorship that is characterised as an audience-apparatus complex. This contrasts with conventional models of spectatorship, where the apparatus functions as a sublimated element or blind spot in the viewer’s experience. This exhibition pursues a series of strategies to foreground this complex, including the creation of viewing devices that bring the viewer into a physical relationship with the apparatus, emphasising its objecthood, or extending it spatially to place the viewer within the apparatus itself.
Image : Christopher Handran, Light Props 2012
