no title, 2023
Printing on foam board
6 in x 4 in x 2
It seeks to unsettle the conventional agreement between the artwork and its institutional framing. If two or more exhibition labels can simultaneously function as both referents and referents-to, their significance may no longer rely on the objects they purport to describe. Instead, meaning is displaced towards the interpretative acts of the viewer, shaped by the immediate context in which the labels are encountered.
These labels—whether perceived as bureaucratic instruments of institutional authority or as autonomous works in their own right—intervene in the ontological structure of the exhibition. Their presence conditions not only what is seen but how it is thought. The viewer's cognitive engagement with these elements initiates a destabilisation of the conceptual foundations on which the exhibition rests. Ontology, in this sense, becomes an unstable field: provisional, mutable, and contingent upon perception and its conditioning forces.
Within such a framework, the physical site of the exhibition begins to recede. It is replaced by a plurality of overlapping and, at times, conflicting ‘exhibition concepts’—intangible and transitory structures shaped by those who possess the agency to define or influence the exhibition's conceptual identity. The work, therefore, ceases to occupy a stable spatial logic. It exists instead within the fluid negotiations of meaning, authorship, and authority as enacted in the subjective space of the viewer’s mind.