Wrapped

A Solo Exhibition composed of eight paintings referred to as Shrink-Wrapped Paintings, the scale of these works ranged from 40 x 30 x 10 cm – 125 x 100 x 10 cm. Printed instructions were displayed on the galley walls for the audience to follow, so they could participate in the making of the work, tables, scissors and shrink-wrap plastic.

My Shrink-wrapped Paintings are durational paintings, a term I coined in my PhD thesis. The Shrink-wrapped paintings bring together non-traditional painting materials with the traditional surface of a painting, a stretched canvas. These paintings enable collaboration in the practice of painting, forms of collaboration which are perhaps antithetical the wider understanding of the medium of painting. Viewers become collaborators.

Importantly, I am not the sole creator of the Shrink-wrapped Paintings, I delegate their making to others, as a means of ensuring their ongoing duration. Each painting is accompanied by a list of instructions that others must follow if they wish to participate in the work, they can add objects of their own in the paintings and bind them to the surface of the work using shrink-wrap.

The works are intended to set up complex social situations. For example, once bound into the painting, objects cannot be retrieved; in this way the hosts act like donors, giving parts of themselves away to keep another ‘alive’. But the transparent indexing of their own making which I referred to earlier, conversely, disappears. The transparency that one expects with cling-film vanishes; instead, the paintings appear to be coated in an opaque film. The more items hosts and spectators add, the more layers of shrink-wrap that are used, the less visible the materials in the paintings become. The labour of participants is erased but simultaneously recorded.

Because I cannot see what the others add into the paintings, nor do I ask for a record of objects added, there can be no judgment value placed on what has been gifted to the work. This in turn dismantles any hierarchies between a precious keepsake or a discarded shoe.

My paintings cannot be experienced all at once, there is future life and labour to come, they will never ‘end’. These paintings are never complete, any experience of the work, is merely just one of many momentary experiences.

• https://sambelinfante.com/work/fold-2017...