FutureEverything - winner of the Lever Prize 2010

Monitored Landscape No. 16 - Robin Tarbet

2010
Mixed media / CCTV camera, monitor

Live installation created by a small camera transmitting an ongoing live feed to a monitor.

Playing on our desire for wonder and curiosity, whilst prompting us to question our everyday perceptive assumptions, my work inhabits an ambiguous place between reality and fantasy.

My own fascination with illusion and the unusual effects of scale and perspective leads me to dismantle, dissect, and distort everyday objects and appliances. I purposely re-generate the redundant, which enables me to create work that at a first glance is aimed to be familiar, but subtly transforms to be intriguing and not what it first appears to be.

Tarbet’s work combines live film making with sculptural installations. Descried below by Chris Fite-Wassilak published on 27/07/09 on Frieze.com is 'Monitored Landscape No. 12' a recent large gallery installation made for East International (group show - July 2009) which then toured to Trafo Gallery in Budapest (solo show - January 2010).

Robin Tarbet’s live video installation Monitored Landscape No. 12 (2009) attempts to straddle both worlds, presenting us with a passing industrial wasteland created by the relay from a camera mounted on a model train track as it passes an assemblage of circuit boards and electronics. Tarbet doesn’t cling to his illusion, but rather opens it up with a structuralist filmmaker’s hard honesty.