Involva (1995)
Act I
Pencil on contiboard, Experience sex-contact magazineAct II
seven c-type prints (each 40.6cm x 50.8cm)♦
Adam Chodzko drew a wooded glade onto a found scrap of formica veneered kitchen cupboard door. A photograph of this drawing was then placed as an advertisement in Experience sex-contact magazine with the request to ‘join me here‘. The advertisement attracted responses in the form of a series of letters which were then photographed illuminated by patches of sunlight at the base of trees within a woodland glade at sunset.
The source of the drawing was from a mural catalogue that produced large scale photographic images of idyllic natural scenes to decorate interior walls. The same mural also appears on the walls of a room in the Nic Roeg film “The Man Who Fell to Earth” when David Bowie, an alien, is incarcerated for intrusive medical experimentation.
The location for the photography of the correspondence was a grove of trees on Hampstead Heath, London. Having asked for the advertisement’s respondents’ permission for including their letters (and some submitted photographic images) within the artwork their identities are concealed on each letter by a series of muddy fingerprints. Involva explores the act of ‘joining’, of making whole, completing, or ‘putting back together’ in relation to notions of a join between the real and the imaginary, raw sexuality and the romantic, and the artwork (or image) and its audience. Art critic, David Barrett, discussing the photographic representation of a drawing of a place, sited in a magazine that offered sexual encounters between strangers, wrote:“…a fake landscape attempting to push its way from fantasy into reality, through the vehicle of a magazine in which people vainly try to turn their fantasies into reality on a regular basis. But where are we meant to meet? At this imaginary location, or at the drawing?”
Involva also plays with notions of art as a meeting site for human encounter (with others as well as the more-than-human), the community and the individual, the experience of a fragmented or fluid body, and ideas of a pagan, ecstatic and ritualistic transformation of the self. Later works exploring these themes include Nightvision (1998), Better Scenery (2000 – ), Ghost (2010 -), Thru hole I blind/O/Thru hole oui see (2020), and O, you happy roots, branch and mediatrix (2020).
The work was exhibited in two stages, acknowledging the phases of its process; initially Act I (eg: for Zombie Golf, 1995, BANK, London), and then Acts I & II together (eg; Liquor, (2001) Trafo Galeria, Budapest).
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Related works:
I See Through Every Image. (A souvenir for Laarni; A planting template for Belladonna seeds), 2013
Meetings of people with stammers to describe a fire (1999 – ongoing)
Nightvision (1998)
Product Recall (1994)
Same (2013)
The God Look-Alike Contest (1991-1992)
Transmitters (1991 – )
O, you happy roots, branch and mediatrix (2020)
