Alice Pelot
" I think viewers should be pulled into work, that the body and mind should work to animate an experience that is inst igated, in this instance, by still forms, I don't believe that it should be passively c onsumed (as it isn't Passively made)."
- Robert Anthony O'Halloran
To chew on a coffee cup lid, or kick a rock are actions as ordinary as the objects they affect. Less ordinary is our awareness of how these actions negotiate space. The objects we choose to engage with, our influences on them, and their lives beyond our presence are all part of our lived experience, affecting our spaces as well as those communities that frequent them. Defined then by this process, our simple actions are curatorial in nature. In his works Engage, Discard, Repeat (Multiply), 2012, and his series of Motion Capture Forms, 2014, (defined by the artist as ‘time-base performative installation’) Robert Anthony O’Halloran inspires viewers to conceptualize and animate ordinary past events through site-specific sculptures. In the process of imagined animation, the viewer engages with the idea that there is life everywhere even if a specific event isn’t happening here and now. His practice loosely defined, is one that extends the life of human activity by subtly reengaging it through others at a later time.
Hidden in plain sight, Engage, Discard, Repeat (Multiply) is a series of plaster casts of found, discarded objects, that masquerade as littered coffee cups, and crumpled water bottles, kicked to the curb, cast away in hedges, and packed into pavement cracks. Every second day for the two week Art Walk Exposed in Hamilton Ontario (Canada), O’Halloran scoured King William Street to document, collect and cast the dredges of daily activities, and then replaced the refuse with plaster sculptures exactly as he found them. With only the material to suggest the artist’s intervention, the objects were abandoned, subject to the fate of their uncanny counter parts. At the end of Art Walk Exposed, the sites were revisited for the purpose of documentation. O’Halloran found that of approximately one hundred casts, only thirty fragments remained. His sculptures had all been removed, manipulated, destroyed, or thrown away. The performative installation can be construed as an environmental, political gesture – asking for environmental awareness by drawing attention to litter – but O’Halloran’s interest in dejected objects and his laborious process of representing their presence concerns the relationship between the object and the user in space, as well as the moment we re-engage with those represented items, aware of the sculpture’s uncanny resemblance to used everyday objects.