#146 Mike Goddard, Resonant Axe Lips
3 - 26 May
Mike Goddard (B. 1982, Dorset) lives and works in Norwich. Mike studied a BA at Norwich School of Art and Design in 2005, and an MA at University of Sussex in 2011. His practise involves a range of disciplines, including drawing, collage, photography, sound and film. His process often involves taking complete images and undoing them, so that certain hidden oddities might become visible. He is interested in theories of humour, the uncanny, and social practises of representation
An email conversation between Katerina Artemiou and Mike Goddard.
KA: How does it feel to be back at OUTPOST as the solo show artist?
MG: Really amazing. Outpost means a huge amount to me. The gallery started just as I finished my BA at art school, and it provided a context that made sense of continuing to make work. My own time on the committee was a fantastic experience, although that feels like a long time ago now too.
KA: Your work seems to be like a repurposed archive, something that you have been collecting and then transforming into several pieces of work. What’s the importance of found items in your work?
MG: Existing images are often the starting point for my work. For me, images aren’t just a medium I use to communicate with, they’re also the subject matter of a lot of my work. I’m interested in how meaning is constructed in images, how we read them and how they relate to our experience of the world.
KA: Overlaid magazine pages, reassembled photographs and magazine pages, reorganised jokes. How do you make that work your own, instead of what it used to be? Or is that not important to you?
MG: I sometimes do very little. In Doubles I have literally just shone a light through some magazine pages. So the image from the reverse side of each page appears as well. I think this allows something of the fantastical and hallucinogenic nature of these magazine images to become slightly more apparent, their hypnotic alure. I don’t necessarily want to stop an image from being what it already is. Ideally, I’d just like to stop it from disappearing quite so rapidly into the world of the everyday.
Isolation and repetition are things I use in my work quite a lot. With the Cuts series, most of the central contents of the images are removed. In Indications, voices are taken away. I’m not trying to achieve a ‘minimalist aesthetic’, it’s more a practical technique for focusing on one thing at a time.
In Reorganised Jokes, it’s the punchlines that are missing. These works come from an interest in the sort of stock-image scenarios and clichéd characters that these jokes are constructed from. I wanted to remove these images from the resolved structure of the joke form, to leave them exposed. What we’re left with is a sort of absurd arbitrary ongoing reality.
KA: I recently read an essay by Anthony Downey, it was about moving images in the work of Akram Zaatari. Zaatari is interested in how certain behaviours become trends online, his work consists of found videos from Youtube or are used as a base for new work. Downey calls the source videos for his work, artefacts with commercial value and I can’t help but feel the same about your unboxing/instructions film. What attracted you to these videos and why did you choose to show them in that way?
MG: I watch a lot of this kind of Youtube video, mostly when I’m trying to fix something. I’m interested in the way that meaning iscontructed in everyday vernacular language, like jokes, adverts, photos and magazines, and my interest in Youtube videos comes from a similar place. Like a lot of amateur formats, these videos have quite a strict set of formal conventions. Most of them will begin by welcoming you to the video. What I’ve focused on in Indications is where people stay off-camera, and it’s just their hands that emerge into the frame and visually ‘present’ the video. I’ve removed all the voices from the clips, so the hands have to do all the talking. I think this is the most obviously funny piece in the show. This edge or frame of the image is something I look at in a lot of my work, as a kind of threshold of visibility. The Cuts series could be seen as an attempt to incorporate this kind of threshold into the content of the image.
KA: You were very keen on having something in the gallery that visitors could pick up and takewith them, why’s that?
MG: I like free stuff. And it’s good to send works out into the world. I have postcards of works by other artists on my wall, and I end up spending a lot more time with these than I might do with an originalwork in a gallery. Also, I think it’s good to give something back to people for coming and being interested in art; I’m continually surprised that other people are into such a strange and difficult pursuit.
KA: And finally, talk to me about the plinths!
MG: I decided to leave them unpainted. Mdf is sort of poor material, so maybe this is like finding something interesting in ‘poor’ images like jokes or amateur videos. Paint hides defects, but sometimes it’s good to be honest about how things are constructed.
Photo credit: Alec Game