Daniel - interviewed by Mitchell

Far-out imaginary vision here is noon is the The Project Space by Rotterdam based artist Daniel Fogarty (b.1987). His first show in Newtown brings together a new body of work. Fellow artist Mitchell Kehe took a moment to speak with Fogarty during the install of the show to talk about television broadcasting and the importance of reading.

MK: Im going to start with a few questions. How did you come to make this group of work? And was there any past work that led to it?

DF: This is new work made for PS, bringing together a lot of things I have been thinking about recently. Although, I see it as a continuation of themes and ideas already discussed in my past work such as looking at broadcasting and the drawing time out.

MK: So are broadcasting and the construction of time the two main concerns of the work?

DF: Yes I think so … and using this to construct things outside normative frameworks of thinking. With the work, I try to look at different constructs and at the boundaries of these things. For instance with the TVam branding and logo, I want to pull in to question and pull out a new use for these things, beyond there past use. TVam went out of business in the early 90s. The word is out of mass circulation now; and so its a way of bringing a weighted set of words back into use. A new use to an already heavily constructed word.

MK: There is a lot of text in the work; why do you use text?

DF: Because text is an everyday substance. By spelling things wrong or changing the layout or saying things in different ways multiple times, it is easy to show existing frameworks in it. These things might be a bit harder to show graphically. The way the text is constructed as an exploratory text and language is presenting information and questing it.

MK: And what draws you to using text?

DF: I have always written … and had problems with it. Its something I have always done to think through works, but its always been a background thing … I have never shown texts in the past. It seemed like this body of work lent itself to multiple platforms for out letting of information like text, images and lighting.

MK: How important is the full reading of the text you presented to understanding the work?

DF: There are different levels of understanding … as with anything. So if people do not read the text, but know that it is there is enough … that they know there is a body of text and what it looks like is enough. It does not matter to me. This work relies on misreading and the disturbance of things going awry. So misreading is actively encouraged.

MK: Does this possibility of miss or non-reading possibly by the viewer influence the way that you display things? Does the text rely on the sculpture, and the sculpture rely on the text?

DF: There are different ways in. I suppose an easy way to explain this is actually in the text. In this I talk of post-modernist architecture … and the bizarre incident where this breakfast TV studio that has accelerated architecture where the architecture tryies to explain what goes on inside the building. This is logical and crazy in equal measures. But it makes sense for a broadcasting studio to do this in a lot of ways. Its a simple leap between language and graphics what might be seen and how it might be explained. I see some of the work functioning in the same way as graphic design as mirror and diffuse each other. Both rely on each other to work together. Some kind of strange explaining going on between the two.

MK: Do you think your work is specific to where you come from?

DF: I think so … definitely … maybe … it must be right? I am interested in a slow building of information so a lot of things I think about are things I have learnt over a long amount of time. So these things I am interested in are things I am trying to work with.

MK: Is it illegible from people who do not come from England?

DF: No, it is talking about a time and of a subject when news networks were becoming more common and TVam is a station that can translate to a lot of networks around at that time. Its was created and took place in a global boom era.

MK: And the works in the exhibition work around a lot of ideas and not just one thing. I know you have some interests in publications I was wondering if for this show this body of work if there was something you had in mind for a publication part of it? And if that would be a completely separate thing?

DF: It would make complete sense to exists in many forms, this translation from exhibition to books for instance is something I am interested in. How to take this one thing and translate. To publish it and for it to become another form of transmission. Questions like how you would go about presenting sculpture in print and does that matter come up.

MK: You mean, are you translating or making something completely new?

DF: Yes. You need to when you go to print if you do it specifically or make something physical or tactile or how you can translate all this through different fonts or sizes … we have talked before about speaking or reading text … this is another form of publication … making things public, then there is a whole other loaded gun.

MK: All of this goes hand in hand with the work, dealing with different ways of broadcasting.

DF: Exactly.