Issue 3

Inbal Strauss’ cover image presents an object that oscillates between utility, possibility, and futility. The ‘wasted potential’ of its sardonic title and its lack of clear purpose, at odds with its slick design, chimes in with this issues slightly defeated ‘That’s All There Is’ thematic. Yet it suggests or anticipates an encore.

The introduction to OAR Issue 3, provocatively entitled ‘Let’s keep dancing’, outlines the importance of finishing, ending, leaving and revisitation to practice based research, focusing on generative responses. Contributions range from gentle manipulation of materials to more critical interventions which tackle ideologies of power and difference.

Sophie Hoyle’s video work explores the intersection between embodied experiences of anxiety and the wider material conditions of art practice. A filmic language of starts, stops, repetitions and enclosures emulates the frustrated processes of home work life and the constant negotiation of personal ethics and sincerity engendered by this labour.

In this essay with film excerpts, Catherine Lord with Michelle Williams Gamaker consider the latter’s short fictional documentary, House of Women (2017), which re-auditions actors for the role of Kanchi in Powell and Pressburger’s Black Narcissus (1947), as a form of ‘preposterous history’, expelling colonial ghosts through re-visitation.

Sharon Kivland immerses the reader in her ongoing practice of revisiting and editing the words of psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, recomposing these words as love letters written to her. The seemingly intimate correspondence foregrounds unresolved questions of desire, love and death.

Offering a ‘meditation’ through a range of philosophical positions, Johnny Golding insists that in the contemporary crises artists must continue thinking and dreaming of radical change. Readers are instructed to play specific music and visual material while reading her text.

This article explores how revised conceptions of the world demand new approaches to depicting it, and how revised modes of depiction promote new conceptions of the world. Damian Taylor considers John Constable’s cloud studies of the early 1820s and their role in his production of three curious landscape photographs.

The coppersmith artisan Maestro Jesús Pérez Ornelas of Santa Clara del Cobre with whom the author apprenticed insisted on the ‘un-finishable.’ Michele Avis Feder-Nadoff discusses her instruction in the unfinishing of things, and the notion that perfecting is infinite, and infinitely an unraveling.

Paul Gauguin's 1892 oil painting Arearea (Joyousness) forms the basis of this video, in which Fiona West manipulates beach sand collected from the Queensland Gold Coast, in order to re-imagine actions of appropriation and displacement, and to investigate narratives of portability, in particular the portability and limits of identity.

A film by architect Evangelia Tsilika gathers research material into a narrative on a medieval castle in Porto de Mós, Portugal. Simulating Le Cobusier’s concept of architectural promenade, the film counters approaches based on monument rehabilitation, revealing instead the state of constant development of the castle, its stories and spaces.

An interview of Florian Dombois by Michael Hiltbrunner on the former’s trajectory though artistic research. Dombois was part of key intiatives and co-founded the Society for Artistic Research but is now practising a different model of research as an artist, which prioritises opening poetic spaces over the answerability to institutional ones.