Machines

Machines

These works are part of the JHB Archive project.

In the summer of 2012, Gane purchased at auction the modernist former home of Julian Henry Beck (1914 – 2012), a Coventry based artist, photographer and engineer. In the process of moving in, she found she had inherited an archive of objects from his life.

This series of images builds on earlier works with this archive by constructing abstract machinery from objects found within the garage. The installations made for the camera suggest a function for the tools, sometimes accurate and sometimes absurd that reflects the artist’s notions of their use. The presentation of the domestic, sometimes banal ordinary objects raises the question of what remains and how it is interpreted.

The images offer a critique of how information and objects are privileged and transformed by their presentation within a museum setting.

The prints are overpainted using oils and brushes that belonged to Joe Beck and in some installations have been hung within a web of household cotton selected from the collection of objects.