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Emma Alonze, Emily Burke, Nick Denby,
Laura Dexter, Lianne Elmasry,
Sean Foster, Patrick Gildersleeves,
Rob Jones, Anna Kershaw, Helena Kirk,
Sophie Lawson, Helen Tracey Maclean,
Karen Musgrave, Paul Seymour,
Chris Snook, Ben Thompson.
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Press Release
'Thoughts were things to be collected,
collated, analysed, shelved or
resolved. Fragmentary ideas, apparently
unrelated, were often found to be part of a special layer or stratum of thought and
memory, therefore to belong together.' [Hilda
Doolittle, patient of Sigmund Freud].
'The search for universal truth is an unending one. Even
armed to the teeth with language, a faculty for reason and extensive
technology, absolute reality cannot be
located. [One] method is, of
course, lying vehemently to everyone, including
ourselves.' Sally O'Reilly.
SOCIETY brings together four independent groups of 'collectors',
each founded in West Yorkshire towards the beginning of the 21st century: The
Pro-Domestic Interpreters,
We Are This, Creators of Visual Obscurity and The Faux Bona-Fide
Society.
Each society consists of a group of single-minded,
fanatical, enthusiastic zealots, who
collect, re-organise, classify
and categorise the objects, ideas, thoughts and memories found
in their everyday, and imagined,
lives.
Each group in SOCIETY has its own rules and manifesto, their commonality being an obsession
with the long, arduous process of forming a collection. In the act
of collecting, the members of each society will assume different roles and
personae, intentionally misguiding and misleading
non-members, especially those discredited as belonging to rival
societies.
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The collection of the societies are here presented to a public, and it is left for the observer to
ponder the truth claims behind the accrued 'wealth' and
'diversity' of objects on display,
and to question aesthetic, social and spiritual value when the means of production is only
justified by the end, witnessed in the collection. Are not the
members themselves being 'collected'
here?
Ben Judd, working with a group from Leeds Metropolitan University,
will curate overlapping projects at Redux to be held over May 2006. The project seeks to simulate
four secret or fanatical societies, each represented by the assembly of a
'collection'. The collected objects
here may invoke the apparition of a negative subject: contempt by actors of one private society
for the other that may rival it for dominance in the space will incur antagonistic, random behaviour
from members, in receipt of mutual contempt, yet simultaneously
display signs that nurture the will to conformity; to form moderate
societies, yet whose moderation becomes the most violent of extremes,
which endorses the suppression of its subjects in a substitution performed by its objects.
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