greg streak

untitled (97 linosa close) (2002)

Project : Further up in the Air
Curators: Leo Fitzmaurice / Neville Gabie
Place : Liverpool (2002)
Work :untitled (97 linosa close)

Further Up in the Air (2001-2004) was the follow up project to Up in the AIr (2000 -2001). Both were two ambitious programmes of artists residencies in Sheil Park, Liverpool, jointly initiated and managed by artists Neville Gabie and Leo Fitzmaurice. The residencies and resulting temporary installations coincided with the redevelopment of the whole Sheil Park site, the demolition of existing 1960s tower blocks and the creation of high quality new homes on the same site.

Eighteen artists took part in Further Up in the Air. Building on the success of the first project, information for artists was produced for Further Up in the Air and a press release garnered even wider interest. Both projects have been well documented and critically received in seminars, conferences and publications. One of the exciting and unusual aspects of the two projects has been the continuing programme of activity they have generated.

Artists and cultural practitioners included Lothar Gotz, Will Self, Elizabeth Wright, Stefan Gec and Paul Rooney

Further up in the Air

We walked in and out of countless apartments. Each one contained the residue and clues of the history of the occupant. Each one filled with belongings and the patterns of personal lives. Some had been left as they were for over three years – some of the occupants had died, some had abandoned their lives there in pursuit of another. Regardless of the time that these apartments had been sealed off, for me personally there was still an enormous sense of invasion. Walking through these private domestic spaces filled with boxes of personal memorabilia, furniture, an unmade bed, an idiosyncratic bathroom – all made me feel like an intruder; a wandering voyeur.

Concerned or rather preoccupied with this sense of intrusion into the private, the intervention I decided to play out in Apartment 97 denied this very experience. I opened the door of the apartment, and no more than half a metre beyond the point at which the door fully opened up to, I built a false wall. This in effect denied access to the rest of the apartment. I proceeded to sand the floors of this small cubicle entrance space, paint the inside of the door with white gloss enamel as I did with the electrical box positioned on the wall to the right of the door. I then proceeded to wallpaper the four walls of this newly constructed space. The wallpaper was white and the texture was a tread plate pattern imitation. The feeling of this space was clean, clinical and unemotional. I continued the skirting board from the actual apartment walls around onto my false wall and strategically placed a dado rail at a height that sealed the split in the false wall from where the lower section could be removed and the apartment accessed. At eye level and centrally placed in the false wall was a security viewer, not dissimilar to the very one in the door of Apartment 97 itself. In fact, this was not a security viewer at all, but the front eyepiece of a telescope that was behind the wall. In the internal space of the apartment that one could no longer access, was a series of strange, rudimentary constructions. The first, mounted on the back of the false wall was a basic wooden construction that held the protruding telescope in a horizontal position so that it was static and so that the eyepiece sat flush with the wallpapered surface on the other side. Some six metres away from the end of the telescope was a further construction. A series of strangely sawn pieces of different types of wood, joined together in a peculiar design, served as nothing more than a stable base to support a 2 x 1 metre mirror positioned at approximately 45 degrees to the focus of the telescope. In its refraction, what the mirror reflected, was a series of white wind driven turbines positioned at the coast some 3 miles or so away. The focal lens of the telescope was focused in on this area of the mirror. It was then pulled back to being slightly out of focus and with the aid of some silicon sealant, held into this position.

For the viewer, what I was interested in was a sense of non-delivery. To upstage any expectation; to deny access into the private and to turn perception upside down and inside out simultaneously. During the days of open studios, the time when people would come to see the varying interventions that had taken place during the residency, I was aware that people would start at those apartments at the top of the tower block and work their way down again. Since I was on the 9th floor, it was inevitable that many other apartments would have been seen prior to arriving at mine. The door to the apartment 97 was always kept shut. The viewer had to open the door to enter. Expecting to walk in to an open space and snoop around another two-bedroom apartment and witness some strange intervention was immediately denied. One barely entered through the door to be confronted with a wall made to look like all the others and that promptly denied any access whatsoever to the internal spaces of the apartment itself. This was an enormous disappointment. Some noticed the security viewer, others were prompted to its presence. Once again this was merely a device on my part of non- delivery in two parts. The viewer, now expecting to get a fish eye lens access to the internal cavern of the apartment were once again denied. What they were confronted with was not the inside of the apartment, but what was outside it. Not directly outside either, not in their line of vision anyway, but in fact a view at right angles to that and some 3 miles away. What they saw was not static but an out of focus movement of a series of white 3 blade propeller wind turbines on the coast. Even the focal lens of the telescope was shifted so as not to give full access. The viewer had to work hard to even identify what it was that they were looking at. The blurred moving image had the quality of an old silent movie; a bit out of focus, a bit jittery in parts. What made this peculiar is that this was hardly the expected vista the viewer was expecting to have. At the end of the day, it was all about denying the voyeuristic tendency of human nature.