Framework is a sort of filing system or archive of all the art works from all the museums at once — a massive and immersive collection. The ink on paper sketches are based on framed historical artworks, pasted one on top of the other, creating a simultaneous view. The eye wanders from one image to the next as if the whole of the history of art could be there, coded and compressed, icons reinvented as signs. In a way, that’s how the images are stored in my mind. I can recall them without much detail, just the outlines of their general components as economical thumbnail sketches.
I’ve spent years looking at collections in art museums, thinking about how we’re caught in a circuit of image reception and reproduction. It’s impossible not to be influenced by these selections and presentations. I’m aware of being trapped but also propelled by these images and histories.
In making these studies, I’m engrossed in them for a few intense minutes without focusing for long on a particular piece — as if playing the role of the tourist, moving through collections of ‘great’ art works, immersed in the context of the museum and its arrangement of objects and images, including plinths and frames in grand crowded galleries. This is the experience of the spectacle that informs my work.
Sadie Chandler
January 2020
