Anne Tallentire

Installation view, But this material…, The MAC, Belfast, 2021.

WALL WORKS

Fence, 2021, wall drawing, masking tape, 299 x 345 cm

Area, 2020, laminated MDF panels, dimensions variable

Area, 2020, laminated MDF panels, dimensions variable

Area, 2020, laminated MDF panels, dimensions variable

Area, 2020, laminated MDF panels, dimensions variable

Area, 2020, comprises numerous rectangular MDF panels scattered across the gallery walls and builds on an installation of the same title staged at Grazer Kunstverein in 2018. The dimensions and colours of the panels are taken directly from items of furniture found in the common area of a social housing complex in Graz, brought there by the residents for communal use. Animating the dynamic between the specific and the generic, the work considers, according to Tallentire, ‘how the performance of such collective placement, especially around everyday objects, can be determined by economic, practical, aesthetic and cultural factors.’

Outermost, 2019 – 2021, metal self-drill screws, neon index sticky tabs, dimensions variable

Outermost, 2019 – 2021, metal self-drill screws, neon index sticky tabs, dimensions variable [detail]

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There is here, Never within memory, The event had not happened, Prior to, 2020, Xerox EcoPrint Paper 75gsm, 200gsm card, masking tape, Post-it Note, 33.5 x 25 x 2.5 cm [each frame]

It is, More to, What is, Another, 2020, Xerox EcoPrint Paper 75gsm, 200gsm card, masking tape, 27.3 x 25 x 2.5 cm [each frame]

There is after, Lines of escape, One might say, First example, 2020, Xerox EcoPrint Paper 75gsm, 200gsm card, masking tape, 33.5 x 25 x 2.5 cm [each frame]

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This series of collages from 2020 employ floor plans of buildings that hold personal resonance for Tallentire, among them the social housing development in Graz and her own home. The plans are partially obscured by blank rectangles of card paper, shapes that correspond on a one-to-one scale to paragraphs from books that Tallentire selected from her shelf while working from home during lockdown.

Although the titles of the collages derive from the first words of the chosen paragraphs, they are otherwise emptied of textual content, retaining only the physical structure. Juxtaposing diagrammatic representations of building spaces with the physical shapes embedded in the act of reading, this series plays with the perception of two very different kinds of spatial systems that suffuse ordinary life. Through such a manoeuvre, the series illuminate the ubiquitous—and often seemingly natural—physical norms of the everyday that are in fact dictated and constrained by cultural and social determinants.

From, in and with: GH3, 2015, C-print on HFA photo rag paper, 64.5 x 72.5 cm [framed]

From in and with: CS2, 2015, C-print on HFA photo rag paper, 70 x 62 cm [framed]

From in and with: ER1, 2015, C-print on HFA photo rag paper, 70 x 62 cm [framed]

From in and with: RM1, 2015, C-print on HFA photo rag paper, 70 x 62 cm [framed]

From, in and with: GH – 3, 2015, C-print on HFA photo rag paper, 64.5 x 72.5 x 3 cm [framed]

From, in and with: JR – 4a, 2015, C-print on HFA photo rag paper, 64.5 x 72.5 x 3 cm, [framed]

From, in and with: AC3, 2015, C-print on HFA photo rag paper, 64.5 x 72 x 2.50 cm [framed]

From, in and with: GH1, 2015, C-print on HFA photo rag paper, 64.5 x 72 x 2.5 cm [framed]

From, in and with: GH2, 2015, C-print on HFA photo rag paper, 64.5 x 72.5 x 2.5 cm [framed]

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From, in and with, 2015, is a series of twenty-four photographs commissioned for an exhibition curated by Val Connor for The Women’s Council of Ireland. The work developed from the descriptions (provided by six women architects in Dublin) of buildings photographed by Tallentire on a walk through the city.

The objects (at hand) depicted in the photographs were selected and arranged in relation to prompts the texts provided, which in turn were used as a template for drawings that became plans for new buildings. The photographs, and titular namesakes of the buildings’ architects, precipitate semiotic interplays between text and image—suggesting that the production of our lived world is contingent upon dialogue.

Photositings, 2007—ongoing, archival pigment print mounted on aluminium, 7.7 x 87.5 cm

walking

In Practices of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau held a magnifier to the tactical and resistant aspects of ordinary daily practices. He dedicated an entire chapter to walking, in which he opposed the walker to the voyeur. Walkers are the ‘ordinary practitioners of the city’, he wrote, whose ‘bodies follow the thicks and thins of an urban “text” they write without being able to read it’; the voyeur’s urban space is geometrical and panoptic, while the walker’s is ‘anthropological, poetic, and mythic.’¹

While walking through London, Tallentire began taking photographs of things piled up on the pavement. Some of these photographs, cropped and paired, later formed the basis of the Photositings series. These images from everyday urban encounters are part of a tactical peripatetic practice that finds and makes meaning through mobility, transience and chance. They operate, in de Certeau’s words, ‘down below’.

ordinary

Much of Tallentire’s work is borne of mundane things encountered on the street. Photositings is filled with prosaic and rough-hewn objects, which have been moved out onto the street and placed or thrown down, stacked, balanced, piled, leaned, draped, weighed down, or grouped and bounded. It is a series of ordinary life’s overlooked material manoeuvres.

flux

When asked why he made assemblages from ‘junk’, Alan Kaprow replied, ‘It was very liberating to think of oneself as part of an endlessly transforming real world.’²

Tallentire’s images freeze but also inhabit the perpetual flux of material configurations. They mark brief moments of acknowledgement within a continual flow.

multiple

Photographic images rarely operate singularly in Tallentire’s work. Here, each structure is doubled, articulated through two possible views. When exhibited, they come in multiples; pairs are stitched together, one followed by another, side by side, unfolding as a rhythmic progression. Each presentation makes possible a novel constellation, while new encounters on the street continue to expand the collection of pairs. The work is composed as an unbounded inventory, configured to be reconfigured.

— Amy Luo

1. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 93.

2. Susan Hapgood, Neo-Dada: Redefining Art, 1958–1960 (New York: American Federation of the Arts, 1994), 116.

Dimora, 2007, c-type print, 61 x 43 cm

Dimora, 2007, c-type print, 61 x 43 cm

SCULPTURE

Slide, 2019, polystyrene insulation board, tarpaulin, gaffer tape, painted MDF, laminate off cuts, 14 x 141 x 75 cm

Slide, 2019, polystyrene insulation board, tarpaulin, gaffer tape, painted MDF, laminate off cuts, 14 x 141 x 75 cm [detail]

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