The Immense Ventriloquism
TC McCormack
if I could, I would be ungraspable, I would be a broken hammer,
rather than a nail, I surely would, If I could[1]
In this exhibition, TC McCormack considers how our man-made structures exist in and out of time, how the course of history continually reappraises objects, resources and even nature.
The Immense Ventriloquism has a particular rhythmic structure, which is achieved through the cadence of the visual phrasing in the films, and in the recalcitrant curation of a series of pattern motifs, that act upon the work and space.
A diptych of films sets up a dialogue in nationalmuseum, a spatial and tonal conversation that pervades the other works. Their sequential construction sees different scenes move between and across the two films. Each scene appears as a material configuration: from a divergent fragmentation, an unfolding act of dislocation, to a rupture that triggers a reclassification of place.
Accompanying the films is a large suspended print and an arrangement of objects and sculpture illuminated by animated light projection.
The title was inspired by a section of a poem by Wallace Stevens.[2]
[1]lines taken from the film diptych
[2] Wallace Stevens, “Not Ideas About the Thing but the Thing Itself”, The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, Alfred A Knopf, New York 1954
“It was not from the vast ventriloquism
Of sleep’s faded papier-mache…
The sun was coming from the outside. “