Rumors 2011

Curator: Looking at this interesting mixed-media assemblage sculpture from 2011, titled "Rumors" by Goran Despotovski. It certainly piques the curiosity, doesn't it? Editor: Absolutely! My first impression is…enigmatic. These dark shapes, almost like shadows trapped in medallions, evoke a sense of suppressed communication. Curator: Precisely. What I find intriguing here is Despotovski's choice of material. We're looking at what appears to be an industrial material cast into repetitive oval or circular forms – medallions really. He then applies dark abstract shapes within. I’m wondering how those forms are fabricated, the consumption implicit within that process? Editor: Formally, there's a powerful contrast between the smooth, cool gray of the medallions and the stark, jagged darkness within each oval. It’s simple, really minimalist, almost austere in its restraint. Are those forms silkscreened on? I am keen to unpack what signs can we read into the formal arrangement as a whole, their relative scale to one another on this neutral, cool grey plane? Curator: They seem applied – though let’s get that verified with the conservation department – rather than integral to the medallion’s material matrix itself. That stark simplicity is very deceptive – given the title, which evokes the subtle means through which whispers, exaggerations, or outright falsehoods propagate themselves. Editor: A telling point. Each medallion then acts as an individual voice, a vehicle for these "rumors," yet they are flattened, muted, and monochrome. All individual character has been leached away from those voices by the abstract process that has rendered these down. Curator: Interesting, and certainly, how these abstracted dark shapes hint at clothing, figures, some object, all but undefinable, speaks to the unreliable nature of the transmitted message as a consequence of its transformation by that means of production you mention! The work sits upon the very ground where all stories, truthful or deceitful, proliferate – the marketplace, if you will. Editor: And in its monochromatic rendering, there’s no nuance or inflection in each telling—each medallion offers merely a stripped-down impression of the truth it transmits. Very economical but with the impact of being slightly…menacing. I'm reminded a bit of conceptual photography by artists like Bernd and Hilla Becher. Curator: Right, very interesting and certainly valid to relate it to the cold documentary feel of the Bechers' bodies of work. Considering this conversation, next I want to look into how the work, in installation, implicates its viewer in a social narrative! Editor: Absolutely, an essential way to examine the formal choices that build outward into ever-expanding systems of meaning.