AIR: Patrick Pound
Patrick Pound
New Zealand / Australia b.1962
The air lock 2022
Photographs and objects from the artist’s collection and the QAGOMA Collection
Dimensions variable
Boxes of air 2019–22
Found photographs and objects, archival box
Seven works (two sizes); size A: 26 x 33.5 x 4cm (closed), 26 x 33.5 x 26cm (open); size B: 30.5 x 46.5 x 4cm (closed), 30.5 x 46.5 x 30.5cm (open)
Photography and air files 2022
Collage
12 works: 48 x 40.5cm (each)
Photograph scatter 2022
Found photographs
Dimensions variable
Screen-based project 2022
Digital project across four screens
4 x 27-inch monitors
Courtesy: The artist, Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney, and STATION, Melbourne
The air lock 2022 is like a giant puzzle, inviting us to consider how the invisible subject ‘air’ can be held in a myriad of ways. Patrick Pound is an avid collector. He gathers artworks from both his own collection and, for this work, QAGOMA’s holdings. Paintings in gilded frames share space with an asthma inhaler, an air hockey puck and other odds and ends; all are carefully selected.
Image Gallery
Installation views of Patrick Pound’s works installed at GOMA for ‘Air’, 2022–23 / © Patrick Pound / Photographs: M Campbell and J Ruckli, QAGOMA
Pound collects and categorises. Mostly, he buys old photographs and objects online that he arranges in chains or constellations of common meaning. Holiday snapshots, bronze sculptures, toys and famous paintings: ‘They’re all treated equally’, he states, ‘which is not to say that the objects have equal value’. For the game he proposes to work, the assorted objects must be given a ‘sabbatical’ from their usual task.
‘I’ve always liked the idea of capturing something you can’t see, or trying to come to terms with it, come to grips with it’, says Pound. A subject such as air must be grasped through the involvement of other, more concrete images and objects.
Pound’s installations invite us to notice connections. What common thread do these photographs and objects share? It is the idea of ‘air’ — an invisible subject Pound believes can be expressed through removing everyday things from their familiar context so we can see them anew.
Image Gallery
Patrick Pound / New Zealand/Australia b.1962 / The air lock (details) 2022 / Photographs and objects from the artist’s collection and the QAGOMA Collection / © Patrick Pound / Courtesy: the artist, STATION, Melbourne and Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney
Boxes of air 2019–22 and Photography and air files 2022 reveal how, as Pound suggests, ‘the world changes slightly’ when two or more things are placed in relationship to one another. How the objects affect each other is left to our interpretation. Musical instruments, boats, stethoscopes, planes, a yawn, fans and bubblegum assume new meaning.
Pound works via collecting and categorising, wryly observing: ‘increasingly, my work seems to be made as if by someone who, on trying to explain the world and having failed, has been reduced to collecting it’. Mostly, he buys old photographs and objects online that he then arranges in constellations of common meaning.
Pound also has an interest in how the internet, which he calls a ‘vast unhinged album’, makes sense of things via binary logic, such as either/or, and/or, and similar searches. Screen-based project 2022 enters Pound’s air-related photographs into an internet search algorithm which reveals up to 100 images rapidly distanced from the original subject as the algorithm ‘reads’ the lines, shadows and highlights of the source material, rather than understanding its content.
On photography and air 2022 asks us to grasp ‘air’ through images — whether sourced by Pound, algorithmically generated, provided by children or shared by gallery visitors. As the artist proposes: ‘To collect is to gather your thoughts through things.’
Explore ‘Air’
