Patrick Pound
Patrick Pound’s work has often had the notion of collecting and the archive at its core. The digital camera is a collecting machine for this artist.
Pound began with a major (ongoing) series of photographs of the ‘Hard Rubbish’ collection in his neighbourhood photographing ‘inside things’ stacked outside awaiting collection.
Pound then made three major photographic installations - for the inaugural Auckland triennial, the CCP and the ACP setting up a room of a fictional character who collects the world in photographs. The rooms operated as both a memory and a sorting machine.
Another series, Little remains, is made up of photographs that activate the space between things and their representation. Photographs in this series include a saucer with a coffee stain that happens to be in the shape of a map of New Zealand, and a piece of unfinished skywriting that looks like a ‘less than’ sign. Pound calls this work Less than sky. This series covers things from stains to snail trails.
Much of Pound’s work treats the world as if it were a puzzle to be solved. It as if he could only find, and photograph, all of the pieces he would solve that puzzle. Pound has made numerous works with grids of his photographs; from all the photographers in one building (Rome’s Pantheon), to 28 pieces of screwed up paper, found one per day, on walks from his home in the month of February.
Collection is also at the heart of the soft focus photos that he retakes from the daily papers. The photographs in the vast ongoing series Soft model real estate are taken with a mobile phone. Each picture is taken from the real estate pages of his local paper. They are of a model world, where the real and the fake become indistinguishable.
(Patrick Pound 2007)
