Art Metropole

#15180

DOMENEST 21 cards for mobile strategies of display & mediation

Artists

paula roush and natercia caneira

Date

2022

Publisher

msdm publications

Format

Artists' Books

This deck of cards developed from the performative installation DOMENEST, a collaboration between paula roush and natercia caneiro at msdm House-studio- gallery. Activated in several public gatherings throughout 2020-2021, DOMENEST consisted of an evolving assemblage of furniture, household items, studio collections, photographs and music instruments nested under a hanging sculpture made of white gossamer fabric.
The title is a new word made by joining the word DOME, a site-specific reference to msdm location, facing a former Rapier missile-training dome and THE NEST, a symbol featured in the card pulled out of the Holcomb Tarot the day the installation was created.

Upon their arrival on the 1st floor of the building, participants were handed a card from the DOMENEST deck for an experiential hands-on engagement with installation. The first two iterations of the deck, contained single words, designed to stir up curiosity, open-mindedness, spiritual awareness and intuitive playfulness.
This 3rd iteration of the deck of cards evolved from observing the users performing the installation, and reflecting on how they worked together, and reorganised the elements in the installation to create new constellations of sounds, visuals, and environments. We envision it as a set of creative strategies for group work and play, that can be used with DOMENEST installation as well as applied to other situations.
It may be useful when facilitating collaborative projects, particularly in the field of interdisciplinary visual arts, when dealing with archives, collections of photographs, and found objects.

Keeping with msdm ethos, dedicated to mobile strategies of display and mediation, the cards contain instructions that can be applied to situations related to change, be it moving from one building to another, transforming a collection of objects into an intuitively organised archive, or many other process-based enquiries that aim to achieve open and recombinatory outcomes.

When all the 21 cards are layed out in a 3 × 7 grid arrangement, the detail images combine to reveal the total DOMENEST installation, viewed from two sides of the building: the west side (black & white photographs with instructions) and the east side (colour photographs).