Lauren Stephens — Reflections on Rubbish
Maisie Cousins’ innovative photographs from her series Rubbish (2018) present her own colourful perspective on waste and how it impacts our environment. Shoair Mavlian, director of Photoworks, states in the work’s introduction video that she nominated Cousins for the Peer to Peer exhibition because the work is ‘documentary and experimental… seeing things in ways we haven’t thought of before’. Cousins’ works are up close and personal with a subject that we spend most of our daily lives attempting to hide away in our bins, often with haste and revulsion. It’s a strange experience to appreciate these pictures of rubbish looking as glamorous as Cousins’ eye has captured them. Everything has an enchanting jewel-like quality, but it’s hard to forget that being in the literal presence of these works would move most to nausea.
Additionally, this display of Cousins’ work is innovative in an alternate way: the artist has given the curators unique artistic liberties to layer the work. When Mavlian describes Cousins’ photographs as experimental, it’s fitting that the exhibition of such photography is experimental. For this exhibition, curators Thomas Dukes and Lindsay Taylor placed four of Cousins’ framed pictures in various places on top of a colossal photograph. Visually speaking, placing the bigger photograph as a base for additional layers of photographs not only provides additional repetition and dimension to the overall visual image but also tests the balance between eye-catching photography and sheer overstimulation.
Mavlian also states that it’s ‘really important to keep thinking about how photography changes over time’. The same is true with thinking about curatorial practice and how this practice can change over time with experimentation. Historically, the method of displaying multiple works as one cohesive artwork is nothing new. Most commonly seen is the triptych (literally meaning ‘three fold’) or multi-panelled works ranging from medieval altarpieces to contemporary artworks. When considering famous triptychs like Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights (c. 1500) or Francis Bacon’s Three Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944), these works would seem to have a different effect if only one panel of the three was displayed as an independent artwork. It is when these works are together that, as a whole, that their individual contributions to the overall effect of the artwork can be appreciated.
Layering Cousin’s works can have such an effect, with the viewer being aware that there are multiple individual works present which are meant to be considered as a unit due to their display method. In a typical gallery, works are spaced out to visually indicate separation of artworks, but this separation of works is lost when they are placed closely together. Likewise, the effect of a vocal soloist is just as pleasing and but different to hearing a harmony of voices singing together. It is no question that Cousins’ works are enchanting on their own, but such enchantment is enhanced when the works are placed in unison to sing as a whole. This example of experimentation in curatorship can aid in thinking about art and display differently, and how such display of art could change certain effects on the viewer and exhibitions in general.
Peer to Peer, according to the exhibition’s introduction panel, is a varied display of works showcasing ‘perspectives on contemporary life and ways of seeing the world’. The layered display of Cousins’ works is a contemporary take on the traditional exhibition display and an interesting experiment with curatorial artistic liberty. Although the description of this exhibition was clearly intended to describe the works contained within it, it can also be applied to the curatorial choices seen with Cousins’ works.