After watching an interview with Richard Wentworth on Vimeo: ( http://vimeo.com/70104572 )
I noted some of the points that he makes about what a good gallery invites the viewer to do. One thing that he mentions in the interview is that a piece of work should get you to question it as a child does.
he says it should play about with your emotions, making you feel un-easy, joyous and share the feelings with past personal experiences.
As a sculptor, Richard Wentworth uses everyday objects to create a juxtaposition or in some cases an obvious relation that isn't necessarily obvious to us.
The two images above can be viewed in a number of different ways. To a grown adult, these scenes would normally be viewed as rubbish discarded foolishly by someone. Wentworth captures these images to freeze the image so it can be looked at as long as needed to relate it to our past.
As a pre-teen a group of us used to hang around the local shops because that's what kids did then I guess. One thing we used to do was have 'Couch Day'. We would wheel one of the couches from our homes around to the shops and sit there all day with our bottles of White Lightning hidden down the sides of the cushions so the Police wouldn't catch us underage drinking. Although this mental image will differ for other viewers, it's proof that a simple photograph of the simple can cause a wave of nostalgia.
As I mentioned before Richard Wentworth has a knack of creating juxtaposition from simple items. In the above image, we see the plates as something that should be very clean because we eat from them. The drain is seen as dirty so the two ordinarily wouldn't go together. Using the drain to act like a holder or sink drainer adds humour to the image.
