Decoy
Solo project for Tag Team Experiment
Edinburgh
2003
Decoy consists of five A0 posters and a number of decoys of a brick. Here the idea of a decoy should be taken in an analogous sense to a decoy duck used in hunting: it is a model intended to be mistaken for the real thing. It is, therefore, something to be overlooked: something to be taken, falsely, at face value rather than something to be contemplated or looked at as a model.
Printed on the posters are a series of quasi-logical propositions about bricks, decoy bricks and the consequences of placing decoy bricks in a gallery. The propositions are numbered in such a way that it appears they construct some kind of logical argument. They are all statements I take to be true and defensible. However, they are constructed like fiction, in that they contain surprising twists, detours and leaps. The last proposition suggests that decoy bricks invite being picked up.
The bricks are all models of the same brick. They each have an outer layer molded from modelling clay and are painted with acrylic paint. They are left lying around the gallery in the kind of places where a stray brick might get left in a gallery: at the margins; in nooks and crannies; and so on. These are places where things are not usually put to be looked at in a gallery. The decoy bricks might well succeed in being overlooked if it were not for the posters drawing attention to them.
Each brick is placed so that its underside is hidden. Inscribed in the underside of each brick is a diferent reason why a real building has fallen down.
Text of Posters
here
markhutchinson.org 