Involva (1995)
Act I:
Pencil on formica-faced chipboard, Experience sex-contact magazineAct II:
seven c-type photographic prints (each 40.6cm x 50.8cm)♦
Adam Chodzko made a pencil drawing of an idyllic woodland glade on a found scrap of formica veneered kitchen cupboard door. He then placed a photograph of this drawing as an advertisement in Experience sex-contact magazine (a pre-internet form of ‘hookup’ sites) with the request to ‘join me here‘. The advertisement attracted responses in the form of a series of letters which Chodzko then photographed, illuminated by patches of sunlight at the base of trees within a woodland glade at sunset.
The source of Chodzko’s drawing was from a mural catalogue that produced large scale photographic images of idyllic natural scenes to decorate interior walls. The same mural image also appears in Nic Roeg’s film “The Man Who Fell to Earth” (1976) on the walls of a room where David Bowie, who plays an alien, is incarcerated during intrusive medical experimentation.
The location for the photography of the ‘sex-contact’ correspondence was a grove of trees on Hampstead Heath, London. Having asked for the advertisement’s respondents’ permission for including their letters (with some also having submitted photographic images) within this artwork the senders’ identities on each letter are concealed by Chodzko masking them with his muddy fingerprints.
‘Join me here’; Involva explores the desire to become joined to others, to feel whole, complete, or ‘put back together.’ The work plays with the hope of a join between the real and the imaginary, nature and culture, raw sexuality and the romantic, and the artist, artwork (or image) and its audience.
Art critic, David Barrett, in 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 alludes to art being a social site, a meeting place for all forms of human encounter (both with other people, as well as the more-than-human). The work reflects upon the relationship between the community and the individual, and suggests the latter’s experience as being a fragmented or fluid body within that community. Involva also suggests 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 Green, the Flow, the Path of the Game (2021) and The Valley Unfurls its Song (2021).
Involva is also an evolution of Chodzko’s blurring of the dualities between nature and culture, home and garden, urban and rural, young and old, and the ecstatic and the repressed, that can be seen in the earlier works, Untitled Stile (Teenage Version) (1991), Untitled [boundary] (1991) and This Is It (1992)The work was exhibited in two stages, acknowledging the phases of its process; initially Act I (eg: for Zombie Golf, (1995), BANK, London, 21 Days of Darkness: Group Exhibition (1996), curated by Toby Webster, Transmission Gallery, Glasgow), 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)
