Leslie Sutcliffe: Mementos of Six Millennia
Leslie Sutcliffe: Mementos of Six Millennia
This installation consists of ninety-six panels, of varying sizes any number of which can be assembled and reassembled in a multitude of ways. Initially, the individual panels were inspired by the rich visual imagery in Italo Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millennium. This grew to include images from found sources like newspapers, encyclopedias or the Internet. The wood panels are drawn, painted and screen-printed. The panels exist as discrete entities that build sequentially to create meaning in the way words in a sentence or pages in a book create a narrative. But if the panels were pages of a book, they would be unbound and could be rearranged or discarded. Within this work is the potential to physically choose and arrange panels in a way that creates meaning for the viewer that is independent of the artist’s intentions. Someone arranging the panels can use all of them or just a few, leaving the remainder on shelves installed in the corner of the gallery.