

Specifications
Missing is made of watercolour and lead pencil on paper.
The work comprises components with an overall measurement of 55 x 101.2 x 1.85 cm.
26/04/2014 | Missing: four sculptuations by Gail Hastings, Apple Books, Available in 51 countries |
Bibliography
Crabb Annabel,
Review,
2014,
http://gailhastings.com.au/book/missing/, accessed 23 October 2016.
Excerpt
Quiet art, like the work of Gail Hastings, chooses instead to inhabit that moment and furnish it with humour. ‘Missing’ is a (virtual) object — namely the book itself — but it is also a state of being, or rather a state of being displaced. […] The Missing books that are embedded in each sculptuation — virtualized and synecdochic — trap the viewer within a looped mise-en-abîme. Their presence turns each work into a hall of mirrors. The ‘copy’ exists in two different modes, two different kinds of spaces, two different realms of experience. The copy-as-original can be virtual, like an electronic signal, while the copy-as-edition becomes material, like printouts from a master code. Or, the copy-as-original can be materially based, while its replications exist virtually, like photographic scans, whether disseminated or not. No matter how we figure what a copy is, it extends the scope of our experience. We realise that our consciousness exists somewhere between the virtual and the material; or, more to the point, Human events are dreamlike — to use Gail Hastings’ term, our situation is a sculptuation, from which we negotiate a physical world and a conceptual world. The physical world is the sculptural; we can bump against it. The conceptual world is the situational; we imagine or formulate our situation in order to delineate a purpose in life and chart its prospects.
Am I missing something? — the timeless fretful self-interrogation of the enthusiastic but apprehensive gallery-creeper — becomes, in Missing, the shape of the artwork itself.
It’s funny, because everyone recognizes this tendency in the civilian art-lover; this scrupulous and obedient hunt for scraps of meaning hidden here and there by the artist, failure to spot any of which might constitute a serious inadequacy.
it must exist as both. Actual and virtual are equally real, like an object and its image, an event and its dream.
Later artwork
Earlier artwork
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Acknowledgement
I acknowledge the Kulin Nation’s Yaluk-ut Weelam clan of the Boon Wurrung people as custodians of the lands, waterways and skies where I live and work. I pay my respect to their Elders past, present and emerging. I recognise their cultural faithfulness, strength and resilience against the trauma of colonisation. First Peoples’ sovereignty has never been ceded.
Gail Hastings