Lot 105: Missing Slide Projector, 2007

Missing Slide Projector, 2007
Metal, Plexiglas, felt, paper and pins. 190 x 242 x 5 cm. (46 7/8 x 95 1/4 x 2 in). 

 London, Store Gallery, On the future of Art School, 16 March - 14 April, 2007

 Store Gallery, London

We have cinema and we have decoration so art doesn't need to be entertainment, and it doesn't need to be decorative. But we don't have something that discusses really complicated relationships that are in the world and we see all the time around us if we look harder,so art has a good place or a good reason to exist...I think. (RyanGander installation documentary, Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, 2008)
Authorship, originality, collaboration and documentation are some of the notions that Ryan Gander's work often addresses.The context of his work tends to trigger dialogue and debate. In the case of the present lot, stolen notices from Slade Art School are haphazardly pinned to the notice board with a printed image of a hypothetical model for an art school which is based on Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon model of a prison.
The notices consist of tutorial timetables, career meetings and invitations to enter competitions, encouraging production, ambition and promotion for future artists. At the centre of this model of a panoptical art school there appears to be an office with no doors.This image is printed over a notice for a ‘missing slide projector', perhaps alluding to the absence of an authority or to the unnecessary need for its presence. The letter for the exhibition proposal from Store gallery finishes with an open question: "And if freedom is no longer the preserve of a mythical education sanctum, but in fact a constituent part of the pervasive power of global capital, where then might artistic resistance lie?"