MARK JEFFERY COLLABORATION

Anynumber: NoPlace- a Site Sensitive Digital Installation (2005)

By Mark Jeffery, Judith Leemann and Judd Morrissey

The latest iteration in a series of digital site sensitive works by these Chicago-based artists, ‘AnyNumber : No Place’ creates haunting visual/textual memorials to disappearing working class iconographies, particularly those that place the masculine figure in relation to domestic and vehicular spaces.

From the interior of the abandoned Beattie’s Toy Shop, carefully constructed acts (both written and performed) of labour and mourning are projected each evening through an altered curtain that hangs in a single window of the empty building. The curtain is constructed from two sheets of blackout cloth that have been sewn together with red thread and skinned with a blade to reveal the semi-transparent surfaces of a stenciled house and pathway.

Within the cut-out house, a silent figure builds, with a model farmhouse, tools, tractors, lorries, and die-cut men, a series of near-still portraits that are interrupted by the attempts of a software program to represent task-based labor through graphical and textual* routines. The scenes give homage to the passing of a day that is haunted by the absence of men who, through death or infirmity, have left their labours behind - whose vehicles will not run anymore because the worker has stopped working.

*The texts are partly drawn from journal entries made by Thomas J. Morrissey Sr., a World War II veteran, who died in 2004.

Special thanks to Kirsten Lavers, Taxi Gallery Cambridge and Roger Brown/George Veronda Residency Programme of The School of the Art Institute of Chicago

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