anne o'callaghan

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the secret life of objects

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The Secret Life of Objects
200 small galvanized tin dustpans.
A text map of the shoreline of the Atlantic Ocean

The Cooler Project @ Made, Toronto Ontario, 2010

Collecting and looking at things and using them out side of their original intent runs like a thread, a current throughout the history of fine art. The Secret Life Of Objects a narrative that takes a small object on a journey

Historical Fact:
A walk along Dundas Street. A window full of small metal dustpans. The collector in me leaps into action, what could I not do with a few hundred small metal dustpans!

Fact or Fiction:
The answer is in the question; marketing survey research consultancies have known this for years. Did I ask the owner of the Portuguese Store, “were these made in Portugal”, or did I ask where are these from?

The answer the same “Portugal”, but not the same, one is his answer and the other mine. In my story they came from Portugal, moving along the Atlantic current, rather like the explorers of old: migrating following the currents.

This installation, a memory from “home”. The Atlantic Ocean a ‘continent in negative’, the space between places and peoples. A moving space that connects a network of cultures from Greenland to South America.

Snaking down many costs, moving from one culture to another, cold freezing warm hot, fast and slow, moving people, ideas, stuff, artifices, still moving long after people and ideas are forgotten. AOC

selected projects:

  • Utopia! Who’s Listening Now
  • here there no where
  • just never enough
  • walking the lakeshore
  • the secret life of objects
  • shape shifters
  • flight path
  • scenic view
  • time as place

Copyright © 2023 · Anne O'Callaghan