Adam Chodzko’s - Great Expectations
Date uploaded: January 26, 2015
Inspired by a series of enigmas surrounding the world’s most complete collection of 18th century tools, artist Adam Chodzko’s 'Great Expectations' weaves together past, present and future in a new video and sculpture connecting public spaces in the Medway towns of Gillingham, Rochester and Chatham with the private interiors of home and school. Great Expectations is the final commission in Hoodwink’s three-year programme of site-specific projects in the everyday places of Kent.
Housed in Rochester’s Guildhall Museum, the Seaton Tool Chest is a large wooden cabinet housing the 200 tools that were a gift from cabinetmaker Joseph Seaton to his son Benjamin in 1796. Benjamin had responded to his father’s generosity by using the tools to make a beautiful cabinet to store them in, then never used them again. For Chodzko the act is the perfect symbol of acceptance and rejection between child and parent.
Combining animation and documentary, Chodzko’s video explores these subversive ideas, re-imagining the chest as a conceptual art object transformed into a virtual entity or spaceship in a revolution instigated by the tools. Now living in digital form, the tools narrate their history, a tale of familial, social and cosmic joinery. They also claim to have made Ark Eye, a wooden sculptural object that has crash-landed from their digital universe into ours, to become a sci-fi museum curiosity.
Over six months Great Expectations appears in the consumerist surroundings of a DIY store, the rarefied environment of the museum, as a hyper-real intrusion on a massive screen overlooking a busy bus station and car park, in the domestic residence of a traditional sign-writer and his graphic-designer daughter, and within a school community.
B&Q, Gillingham and Guildhall Museum, Rochester, 13th of February to September 2015
Big Screen, Waterfront Pumping Station, Chatham, 13th of February to the 24th of April 2015
Adam Chodzko’s art explores the interactions and possibilities of human behaviour through video installations and subtle interventions, situated both within the gallery and the wider public realm.
Great Expectations is realised in partnership with The Guildhall Museum Rochester, Medway Council, and is the ninth and final project commissioned by Hoodwink that includes Hollington & Kyprianou’s The Castle for Wilko’s in Folkestone and Simon Faithfull’s Things for Morrisons Supermarket in Tunbridge Wells. Hoodwink’s other commissions include Terry Perk and Julian Rowe’s Catoptromancy, a large-scale kaleidoscopic sculpture in Ashford’s County Square Shopping Centre, and many others.
In parallel to Great Expectations, Hoodwink’s commission by artist-filmmaker Andrew Kötting, The Woman of Kent, screens as an intervention in the film programme at the Kino Digital cinema in Hawkhurst, Kent until the end of March; and their first commission, Profound Riches by Jonathan Wright continues into 2015, turning the town’s celebrated independent music venue, The Forum into both transmitter and receiver via a sound sculpture on the roof.
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