The Wgtn Experiment - Wendy Bornholdt

22 February - 7 April 2002 in the Hirschfeld Gallery
The title of Wendy Bornholdt’s installation for the Michael Hirschfeld Gallery—The Wgtn Experiment—alludes to an event or an outcome, to a manufactured set of circumstances for monitoring conditions and measuring outcomes. Yet it is unclear as to whether the event in question has happened fully, in part, or is yet to unfold. This is an experiment waiting to be made sense of, loaded with observational and interpretative possibilities. The Wgtn Experiment can be read as a moment removed from a larger course of events. But at the same time the installation is firmly located—like each of Bornholdt’s previous works, it is created in response to the specific architecture of the gallery space.

Before moving to England in 1998, Wellingtonian Wendy Bornholdt made several site-specific works (including installations at the George Fraser Gallery (1992), Govett-Brewster Art Gallery (1996) and Artspace, Auckland (1995)) which placed viewers in environments of imposed order and control. The possibilities for escape or resistance in these installations were not obviously evident, but rather implicit in Bornholdt’s very re-enactment and critique of such systems of control. More recent work (including an installation at Artspace (1998), several works at the Museum of Installation, London (1998―2001) and the Programa Centro De Arte, Mexico (2001)), has led Bornholdt to explore what she describes as an ‘unfixedness of circumstance’—the location of possibility in the spaces-in-between.

A sense of expectancy is produced by the transistor radios projecting grainy white noise from the galvanised iron buckets inhabiting the length of the gallery. They direct our attention towards the slotted viewing window, and to the now sealed and inaccessible room to the side of the long gallery space. And in that room it could be that a moment in time has been captured—or somehow released and infinitely expanded through arcades of new space. The work as a whole posits a kind of potentiality: buckets of sand are at the ready, the space is infused with the random intersection of multiple radio frequencies, and we are drawn up to the slotted window to observe a moment that is perhaps endlessly folding in upon itself. The work, as the artist describes it, is ‘filmic, like a freeze-frame, a kind of parallel universe, a moment with a life of its own’.

 

Rebecca Wilson
City Gallery Wellington