Alexandra Gillespie and Somaya Langley
Alexandra Gillespie and Somaya Langley’s collaborative installation, Collars was centred upon twenty shirt collars dotted around the Canberra Contemporary Art Space’s main gallery. The collars, displayed on stands, were embedded with electroluminescent strips of text. This text was taken from the sound component of the work in which the original collar owners recounted personal memories relating to their garment.
Immediately when one entered the exhibition, the darkened gallery space swallowed up the small and delicate parts of the clothing. This feeling was amplified by the minimal installation; the twenty collars displayed so sparingly, although in conversational groups, did not carry enough weight visually in such a large space. They appeared lifeless, instead of implying the absent wearer of the collar.
Gillespie’s spatial arrangement sidelined the viewer to the periphery of the work and denied any physical engagement with the more subtle use of technology. The small sized text, quite neatly wrapped around the outside of the collar, provided a link to the soundscape of whispered stories which formed an absent crowd conversing. These links between recollection and object needed closer inspection for one to gain some appreciation for the layering of media. This would also help in drawing out the work’s continuous shifting of narrative and the tenuous nature of memory.
We are left perplexed. Why the use of collars? What is it about the collar that Gillespie and Langley perceive as a social object to open up discussion? Although the installation attempts to engage us with the presence of the collars owners (who are friends and family of the artists), we do not gain a sense of these people. The neck is a connection between the head and the