We Live in Public
The Officer's Club, Bath, 27th May - 12th June 2011
Mike Odlin -Untitled (Birth Series) 1985
Soon it will be a decade since 9/11 changed global attitudes to safety and security and has made us the most heavily monitored nation in the world. This decade has also witnessed the lifespan of phenomenally popular Orwellian television series Big Brother, as well as such advances in technology as Google Street View, giving us all the possibility of becoming both peeping Toms and global travellers.
Jason Gibilaro - Big Brother 2 (Duck Pond) 2010
‘We Live in Public’ borrows it’s title from Ondi Timoner’s award-winning documentary film based on the life of Josh Harris, an eccentric internet visionary and entrepreneur. The opening sequence of the film shows Harris recording a video message which he sent to his mother as she lay on her deathbed - his last words to her, as he chose not to be there when she finally passed away. Seeing such an intimate moment as this, the last words to one’s dying mother, being captured home-video style, demands a raw and sometimes uncomfortable acknowledgement that ‘living in public’ means to not only eat, sleep and shit but to fight, make love, give birth and mourn aswell.
“Speaking to you virtually is how I [..] do this best - I’m sending you out in style here. This is haute couture, and now, this is what art is NOW.” - Josh Harris
This art of ‘NOW’ is raw, invasive and dismissive of privacy. The exhibition ‘We Live in Public’ brings together nine artists whose diverse practices tackle issues of privacy and security and explore the merits of the ‘virtual’ as a mode of social interaction.
Hayley Louise Goodsell - Next 2011
‘We Live in Public’ hopes to reveal the sometimes futile nature of surveillance and the absurd fact that playing reality back to ourselves, as is, can indeed become a form of entertainment. We comb through the minutiae of our lives fed back to us, hoping to find some sort of meaning that seems to constantly evade us in first-hand experience.
- Lucy Odlin
Exhibiting Artists:
Mike Odlin
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