Col McCormack

Hybrid Display Structures

2015-2020

Output: Exhibition

The installation Hybrid-Display Structures navigates the complex relationship between the legacy of exhibition making and the contemporaneous reach of curation as art practice, in order to examine the autonomous and authorial positions of artworks.

McCormack’s research explores the limitations of traditional forms of exhibition display structures to directly address and counterpoint invited artworks, by presenting a more symbiotic exchange.

The installation used digital reproduction, physical structure and opaque fabric as mechanisms to re-contextualise the language of exhibition architecture, and reveal an alternative interpretation of the artworks.
The research defined itself both in the form of an artwork, and a legitimate platform to exhibit the work of other artists, in order to challenge our preconceptions of the ways in which we read material and navigate space, and provide insight into the relationship between curator and artist, artwork and context.

To achieve this output, two methods of research were undertaken concurrently: a visual language was developed in order to explore the spatial relationships of artwork, audiences and the conditions of encounter, and a curatorial method was developed to define a dialectical system of correspondence, creating
the conditions for the viewer to construct new readings of the work.

Extensive research was undertaken to develop a new visual language using archive material that included optical registers and digital image calibration, juxtaposed with original decentred pattern designs, and incorporating photographic imagery taken on location.

Hybrid Display Structures was exhibited in The Immense Ventriloquism Part.2, at nationalmuseum, in Berlin (2020), alongside a counterpart selection of curated artworks by seven contemporary artists. The exhibition was extended and reopened with a public talk: Wait – Who Is Talking? for Berlin Art Week.

The research enquiry was supported through preceding exhibitions by Spor Klubu, Berlin (2015 & 2019), Viborg Kunsthal, Denmark (2018) and a residency at KH7-Artspace, Aarhus (2018).