centre d'artistes.artist run centre
Window exhibition
21/12/08 - 11/01/09
Text by Michelle Lacombe and k.g. Guttman click here
In Tamara Henderson’s work When I’m Not Around, presented in articule’s window space during the holidays, the artist has chosen to focus on a simple idea that involves a telephone call and a receiver. This work refers to communicative installations such as Walter De Maria’s Art by Telephone or Yoko Ono’s Telephone Piece. Inspired by these artists, Henderson combines elements such as a telephone, an exhibition, and a poster, where the phone is used as a channel between the artwork, the exhibition context and the audience. However, the artists’ presence has been omitted and replaced with a sculpture: a small structure containing sharings of plastic resembling snowflakes, and a single palm tree. A poster indicates the telephone number and the dates of the exhibition. The performative aspect of the work reveals itself: the telephone call is received by a mobile telephone which vibrates, thus causing the small structure to release a few snowflakes that mosey their way down through the air onto the leaves of the palm tree and gallery floor…
Tamara Henderson was born in 1982 in Sackville, New Brunswick. Her work has been shown recently at the Frankfurter Kunstverein in Frankfurt, Germany; at the Center for Contemporary Art in Kita Kyushu, Japan, where she was one of seven artists selected for a residency; and at the Ursula Blickle Stiftung in Unteroewisheim, Germany. Tamara Henderson is currently based in Stockholm, Sweden.