The Secret of My Success, 2016

Video, 111 mins. Presented in Portrait Orientation

The Secret of My Success is a work which seeks the consequence of a minimal gesture - turning a work on its side - as an act of sly revelation, situating it in a context of doubles and shifting claims to power. The work takes its title - directly appropriates it - from a 1987 Herbert Ross movie, featuring Michael J. Fox and Helen Slater, which features the story of a recent graduate who works both in the mailroom and as a fictional young executive. In an office complex hung with post-1960 abstract painting - Robert Motherwell, Franz Kline, Frank Stella, and recurrently, Josef Albers - the narrative plays a game between two realities, upstairs and downstairs, which is also played out in the staging - through prop reproductions of blue-chip paintings. Like the narrative of the film, the masquerade of appropriated painting comes to a head in one of its final scenes, where the cast return to an office - belonging to the young executive - in which a Josef Albers Homage to the Square is hung sideways by accident. The work extends and manifests the capacity for the reproduced or appropriated image to exist within, and construct new realities. The film is exhibited in its full duration on either a screen or projector turned on its side (so that the final Albers artwork shifts to its originary format), whilst a series of Albers reproductions, are hung in various alternate orientations.

Below: The Secret of My Success, 2016-19

Printed Matter, Installation and Dimensions Variable