Butterfly - Richard Wilson’s video exhibition
24 Jun - 16 Jul 2006
BUTTERFLY
RICHARD WILSON video exhibition
24 th June – 16 th July 2006
• Organizer: Platform China
• Curator: David Thorp
• Opening party: 3:00pm 24 th June, 2006
• Venue: Platform China 798 Project Space
• Address: 4 th floor, 311 building, No.4 Jiuxianqiao Road , 798 Art district, Beijing
Butterfly is video work by British artist Richard Wilson that documents a process based sculpture that is centred upon a sense of unfolding revelation and the desire to recover a lost form.
Richard Wilson bought a scrapped Cessna light aircraft. He reassembled it, stripped its identifying paintwork from its aluminium body and crushed it into a rough ball using an industrial compactor, the kind used to crush scrapped vehicles. The solid lump of metal that resulted from this process was suspended from the ceiling of a warehouse.
Wilson 's film begins by showing this large ball of metal strung between four columns in the empty space. The original object has been crushed into a compressed form and there is little to let the viewer know what it once was.
As the film progresses, Richard Wilson and his assistants attach steel cables to the cube. The cables are stretched under tension to islets sunk into the warehouse walls and then put under tensile pressure by hand operated pulling machines. The metal ball is suspended in space and a slow process of pulling it apart begins using the web of cables and vehicle body repair techniques.
Wilson and a team of assistants worked for four weeks using only hand operated tools, the cables and the structure of the building, to help them reveal the form of the aircraft once more.
This process was continuously documented by time- lapse photography and edited to produce this film work that documents the recovery of the aircraft in compressed time. Finally, at the end of the film, the sculpture's imperfect form finally reaches a point as close to its original shape as Richard Wilson and his team can achieve by hand.
RICHARD WILSON video exhibition
24 th June – 16 th July 2006
• Organizer: Platform China
• Curator: David Thorp
• Opening party: 3:00pm 24 th June, 2006
• Venue: Platform China 798 Project Space
• Address: 4 th floor, 311 building, No.4 Jiuxianqiao Road , 798 Art district, Beijing
Butterfly is video work by British artist Richard Wilson that documents a process based sculpture that is centred upon a sense of unfolding revelation and the desire to recover a lost form.
Richard Wilson bought a scrapped Cessna light aircraft. He reassembled it, stripped its identifying paintwork from its aluminium body and crushed it into a rough ball using an industrial compactor, the kind used to crush scrapped vehicles. The solid lump of metal that resulted from this process was suspended from the ceiling of a warehouse.
Wilson 's film begins by showing this large ball of metal strung between four columns in the empty space. The original object has been crushed into a compressed form and there is little to let the viewer know what it once was.
As the film progresses, Richard Wilson and his assistants attach steel cables to the cube. The cables are stretched under tension to islets sunk into the warehouse walls and then put under tensile pressure by hand operated pulling machines. The metal ball is suspended in space and a slow process of pulling it apart begins using the web of cables and vehicle body repair techniques.
Wilson and a team of assistants worked for four weeks using only hand operated tools, the cables and the structure of the building, to help them reveal the form of the aircraft once more.
This process was continuously documented by time- lapse photography and edited to produce this film work that documents the recovery of the aircraft in compressed time. Finally, at the end of the film, the sculpture's imperfect form finally reaches a point as close to its original shape as Richard Wilson and his team can achieve by hand.