Air

Patrick Pound Born 1962, Hamilton, Aotearoa New Zealand Lives and works in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia The natural object is always the adequate symbol. Go in fear of abstractions. Ezra Pound 1 I want to upset the false need for things to be fixed in their meaning. I want them to behave more like words — to give them more flexibility and put them back to work. Patrick Pound 2 Patrick Pound’s The air lock 2022 looks like a junkyard sale in the middle of the Gallery. Works from both QAGOMA’s and the artist’s collections are arranged atop a large plinth; paintings in gilded frames are propped against the wall, happily sharing space with an asthma inhaler, an air hockey puck, a Scuba Ken doll (of Barbie fame), and many other odds and ends. A select few pieces are hung on the wall. Each item in Pound’s installation has some relation to the idea of air — what that relationship is, however, left to each viewer’s interpretation and resolution. In his practice, Pound works via collecting and categorising. Mostly, he buys old photographs online that he then arranges in chains or constellations of common meaning. His vast collection of photographs has evolved to include a host of discarded things, yet, for him, photos are just as much part of our material culture as three-dimensional objects. ‘I say “photos and other things” to remind people that photos are things. I’m thinking of them all as objects’, the artist explains. 3 Holiday snapshots, bronze sculptures, toys and famous paintings: ‘They’re all treated equally’, he claims, ‘which is not to say that the objects have equal value’. In fact, it is often unclear which pieces come from his romps on eBay and which reside in the state’s art collection. Like the animated robot WALL-E — from the 2008 Disney Pixar film, who combs through the detritus of an abandoned Earth, throwing out diamond rings but keeping their soft velvet boxes — Pound allows us to see things without their museum-ordained status, giving them a ‘sabbatical’ from their usual task. 1 Ezra Pound, ‘Essay on poetic theory: “A retrospect” and “A few don’ts”’ [from Pavannes and Divagations (1918)], Poetry Foundation , 13 October 2009, <poetryfoundation.org/ articles/69409/a-retrospect-and- a-few-donts>, viewed May 2022. 2 Patrick Pound, ‘The gallery of air’, Art Journal , no.53, May 2015, p.78. 3 All further quotes taken from a video call with the artist, 9 May 2022. Patrick Pound / Air heading left (The air lock) (details) 2022 193 192 Change Change