Monday, January 10, 2011

Material and Conceptual Investigations_Theory_2

Rachael Whiteread

Another artist using the 'space' in a monumental form to depict of our everyday lives and (time) history is Rachael Whiteread. In House (1993) she made a ".. cast from the last row house left in an area in East London that was being demolished for urban renewal. The brick and wood structure of the house was used as a mold for the casting... and [after] the structure was stripped away, what was left was a ghostlike monument to the private insides of a dwelling turned inside out". http://www.damonart.com/myth_uncanny.html


There is a sense of not being able to associate a historical/time and space in this work, as well as an odd sense of loss of comfort and an odd unrecognisable architectural language telling you what happened to the building - it's stories over time. It looks more like an ancient civilization has left some sort of burial tomb behind rather than a home, where 200 years ago, families lived.

Whitread's House and similar works play on the 'uncanny' - confronting the human need for an understandable recognisable form... the uncanny as “in reality nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny

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