Group.jpg

2005
Series of Drawings
Collaboration with Vlatka Horvat


Images: © Tim Etchells and Vlatka Horvat

This collaborative work with Vlatka Horvat combines text descriptions and crude outline-tracings of a series of images found using Google’s image-search facility. Culled from unrelated websites, the images are linked only by the fact that each is called group.jpg.

The groups shown in the pictures range from school kids to swimmers, hikers to conference delegates, arctic explorers to family dinner and wedding attendees, each group arranged for the camera in some version of a line or a bunch. In the tracings and descriptions, Horvat and Etchells draw attention to similarities and differences in these groups – in the predictable range of expressions and positions and in the particular codes of dress and self-expression unique to each group. They also highlight the dynamic relationship between text and image, language and the visual – exploring the ways in which text and the simplistic outline tracings both succeed and fail in the task of conjuring up pictures.

Project for publication. First published in Frakcija Performing Arts Magazine. Issue No. 36 (Summer 05): Group Dynamics. ISSN 1331-0100.