FLEAMARKET COMPOSITIONS
Brighton based artist, Rachel Cohen, brought her collection of quirky photographs of objects displayed at fleamarkets to the De La Warr Pavilion this afternoon. The Collectors Corner presentation brought up questions regarding how we make decisions about ordering and organising things and the individuality of this process. Rachel told us how she had spent hours organising the photographs into an order which would “flow” for the slideshow, grouping the objects in the images by theme (such as religious icons), function (e.g.tools), shape or material. Then a second layer of organising was demonstrated within the pictures, this time not under Rachel’s control, instead decided by the stall-holders themselves as they chose how to display the objects on their stalls, whether in chaotic heaps, colourful groups or ordered as rows or grids.
It was interesting to think about how Tomoko Takahashi decides how to position and “display” the objects in her installations and the “internal logic” which governs her decisions about the careful placement of individual items in her seemingly chaotic arrangements.
Rachel Cohen website