Great Expectations  (2015)

Great Expectations  (2015)

Single screen video with sound
9 mins 30 seconds
&
Ark-Eye
Oak fragments, salvaged from the top newel post of an antique staircase from Whitstable, Kent
110cm x 70cm x 45cm

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Great Expectations : low res on Vimeo

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Great Expectations continues Adam Chodzko’s exploration of our capacities for extraordinary reasoning and imagination as manifested within our behaviours, particularly our relationships and beliefs.  Often carried, or even catalysed, by the objects that surround us, our creativity – our acts of making – can be devised to extend their influence across time and space.
Taking the forms of both video and sculpture Great Expectations is a speculative narrative based on historical facts relating to a collection of tools, a tool chest and the actions surrounding these objects as enacted between a father and son.  Developed from specific items of historical material evidence which, if understood collectively, appears to suggest the operations of the fantastic and mysterious within present reality. As with many of his works (eg; Pyramid (2008), Because… (2013), and  Expulsion from the Garden of Eden (2015)) Chodzko follows the path of a peculiar logic that seems to linger in the everyday in order to discover and evolve its potential wider meanings and future implications.

In 1796, a set of 200 cabinet making tools were given as a gift from a father, Joseph Seaton, to his son, Benjamin, in Chatham, Kent.  Benjamin responded to his father’s generosity by using the tools to make a beautiful cabinet in order to store them in. He then put the tools inside this chest and never used them again. For Chodzko, through his own experience as a father, the performance of this act becomes the perfect symbol of acceptance and rejection between child and parent, allowing transformation and growth and a propulsion into the future.  The son, simultaneously honouring and subverting the father’s gift (and the expectations carried with it), transforms his chest into a spaceship or time machine.  In Great Expectations, the tools, within Seaton’s tool chest,  (now housed in the Guildhall Museum, Rochester, Kent), finally emerge to speak and wonder about their story and their revolutionary plans for the human race.

Chodzko speculates as to how we might be able to break with historical continuity; the expectation that continuity, in terms of a family’s affinity for a trade or skill, is automatically the best path to take.  Through discovering a way to become embodied and suspended within an object might allow this break from family tradition,  allowing us to be carried forward in time, concealed, until the time is right for us to reappear, changed.  Great Expectations is a proposition about perception and how a series of apparently strange,  nonsensical actions can combine as ritual, to mesmerise and hypnotise others, in order to attain this higher state of vision.

“An Eye if placed at five Feet above the Surface of the Earth or Sea, sees two Miles & a Quarter every way: but if it be at twenty feet high, it can see 5 3/4 miles.”

(writing found on the reverse of the Seaton Tool Chest inventory, written by Benjamin Seaton; a quotation from An Introduction to the Use of the Globes, and the Orrery: As Also the Application of Astronomy to Chronology, by David Jennings, 1766)

Part historical document, part science fiction and part autobiographical experience, Chodzko investigates the surreal exchanges between tools and art objects, museums and homes, parents and children, the digital and tangible, in a video work, that has, also, apparently, accidentally produced a solid object, Ark-Eye, a byproduct of its ‘screen’ materiality.  Ark-Eye is a body which exists somewhere or other, just out of reach of the video, a wooden ‘sculpture’ that has crash-landed from the tools’ digital universe into ours.  As with this ‘seedpod’ sculpture, Chodzko’s ongoing interest in the unconscious, hauntings, dream states and places beyond perception as explored in enclosed, hidden, private, ‘surplus’ spaces, as vessel, can also be seen in eg; April – May 2000 Arc Ark (2010), and Ghost  (2010) and Holding the Earth this Way (2022).  The deciphering of codes to reveal their secrets also appears in works such as  O, you happy roots, branch and mediatrix (2020), a way from heaven  (2017-2023),  and Plan for a Spell  (2001).

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The voices:  – Leanne Henlon, Marie Dumoulin and Ellis Eyres
The boy:  – Seth Barnard Chodzko
The children: –  Bradfields Academy Special School, Chatham, Kent
Animation: –  John Joe Brophy
Additional sound mix: –  Tim Barker

With thanks to the Guildhall Museum, Rochester, Kent,  Suzie Plumb and Polly Harknett

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