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The Subterfuge of Joshua Petherick

Jan Bryant
Eyeline 77
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The Subterfuge of Joshua Petherick1

The empty flatbed scanner is Satie’s Table Top (2011) [room sheet will explain this], and the soundtrack to the video is a synthesized and slowed-down/manipulated recording from the phone camera of a conversation in the studio whilst the video was being made … The Empty Track After (2011), which is hung vertically in the gallery space, displays very up-close footage taken through an iPhone of the inner workings of the flatbed scanner that has been set using a plugin to memorise the scanning movements of previous scan jobs (in this case the scanner is moving back and forth across the lens of the phone camera, plotting out the empty bed to the specs of the original scans for the framed works)…

Fragments from an email between Joshua Petherick and Croy Nielsen Gallery, Berlin, August 2011

Joshua Petherick’s Artist Assistant is a dressing gown hung on a hook in his installation Saratogian Bedding (Croy Nielsen Gallery, Berlin, 2011). The dressing gown, worn by Petherick a few weeks earlier, had been left in the guest room he inhabited during his residency in an historic artists’ community in Saratoga Springs, New York. Petherick also stole the hook from the studio there, and a book on modern music composition which had been left in his room. These diverse objects, along with horseracing whips and coins, establish the archaeological strata for the work, releasing imperceptible evidence of the thousands of artists and writers who have passed through the community since its opening in 1925—its past successes, its disappointments, its ghosts and unexplained phenomena, and its location near the famous Saratoga Racetrack. Awareness gained in an archaeological context, however, will... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline

Brothers (Toshiba series), 2011. From ‘Simultaneous Solitudes’, 2011. Polyurethane resin, pigment, carbon. Courtesy the artist, Croy Nielsen, Berlin and Hopkinson Cundy, Auckland.

Brothers (Toshiba series), 2011. From ‘Simultaneous Solitudes’, 2011. Polyurethane resin, pigment, carbon. Courtesy the artist, Croy Nielsen, Berlin and Hopkinson Cundy, Auckland.

The Empty Track After, 2011. Video still. Courtesy the artist, Croy Nielsen, Berlin and Hopkinson Cundy, Auckland.

The Empty Track After, 2011. Video still. Courtesy the artist, Croy Nielsen, Berlin and Hopkinson Cundy, Auckland.