Simon Read "There are Capabilities"

April 8 through 11: work in progress April 11 through 19: installation There are Capabilities. (Capability Brown, a English landscape gardener used to say when he saw a landscape which had potential to be formalised: ‘There are Capabilities’.) 'The installation I have planned for De Appel is very much a continuation of a camera started at the Round House Gallery in London in 1978. I had in mind that the chairs, the number and positions of the apertures, and the curved wall of the space, would collaborate to infer in the final photographic image a vast, but ofcourse, non-existant space. This piece was purely an experiment, I was intrigued to see whether any images would be printed at all, and so although in my view the piece was successful, I could not control it to the degree that I made a final image which set up its own credible special relationship. In De Appel I intend to use one tree, and through an organised number of apertures in a camera obscura, (which will cut the space diagonally in half) try to conjure an image of a formal garden. I have always been aware that to observe reality, we have to first of all visually dismantle it, and then reassemble to make a sense which accords with our own codes of perception. A camera, as a human invention works in a parallel way to this process; taking apart the reality on one side of the lens and putting it together again on the other according to certain optical premises. There is a strong risk in these pieces that they may not work, if this is the case, I beg an audience's indulgence.' (Simon Read, invitation De Appel, April 1980.)