The Automaton Olympia's Cabinet of Curiosities
Project Dates: 1994–2002, a series of diverse media sculptural installation artworks which speculatively describes the unstable identity of an absent and unknowable individual through their fictive belongings
The Automaton Olympia's Cabinet of Curiosities, is a series of Installations consisting of sculpture; video; sound; photographs; drawings; objects; equipment found and altered; scripted and spoken narrations; and writings from 1995-2002. Exhibition venues include: Uppsala KonstMuseum (Museum of Art, Uppsala Sweden), Lombard-Freid Fine Arts (NYC), Linda Kirkland Gallery (NYC), Gallerie La Centrale (Montreal, Canada), LAMAG Los Angeles Municipal Gallery (Los Angeles, California)
The Automaton Olympia's Cabinet of Curiosities Installation Works Include:
• Sometimes Olympia Has Trouble Concentrating (The Study)
• Gift, from You, You, You
• The Automaton Olympia Reflects
• The Automaton Olympia Throws Her Voice
• 33 Hours (A Glove Collection)
• The Collector’s Dream
• The Automaton Olympia's Archive
• Stereoscopic Vision
• SV: The Footnotes (Stereoscopic Vision: The Footnotes)
• Building Drawings for a Machine for Electroplating the Dead
• The Collector's Notes
• The Collector's Dream
• Olympia's Jewels
Performance:
Through scripted, spoken, and recorded narration, and in person scripted narration, Daly performs as her double, The Automaton Olympia.
The Cassette Tapes
A group of scripted and spoken narrations recorded on analog cassette tape. These appear in several installation works for the series:
in The Automaton Olympia Reflects: four tapes play simultaneously from different points in a room. Tapes of differing length are staggered to create endless permutations of overlapping narrative pieces.
• Fictions
• Dreaming
• Leonard
• Accidents
As part of Stereoscopic Vision, two walkmen type audio headset devices are spliced into one headset. Two tapes of different duration are staggered, creating endless permutations for overlap of spoken narrative fragments
• Conversational Excerpts
• The Photographs
In The Collector's Dream, three loops of different duration, are staggered, creating a barely audible overlap of 'recollection' regarding the absent character "D"
• Dorothy
The Automaton Olympia's Memoire
was a spoken scripted narration for an SPE panel in Los Angeles, 1996
From the extended review of this project "Decoration and Detection" (PAJ)
“As Rosalind Krauss has shown, Marcel Duchamp (and his alter ego Rrose Sélavy) put together a “panorama of the index” in his last painting Tu m’ (1918); here Ann Burke Daly (and her alter ego, the Automaton Olympia) puts together what we can only call an “index of the index.” The peculiar charge of all these disparate objects seems to rest in the paradoxical, indeed contradictory, double meaning of the word “index” itself.”
"An index preserves the trace of its referent, offers up its material residue, and yet this residue can only present itself as testimony to an absent object, an object both dissipated and opaque. Ann Daly’s collections then are characterized by a recurring failure, a failure to amass a coherent knowledge, to produce a series of self-contained objects. They are collections of holes, if we can imagine this, literally filled with absence. Daly’s project produces a collision between these two understandings of the index, the incongruity of which creates the logic of the work as a whole."
–Review in PAJ | Performing Arts Journal: Download: "Decoration and Detection - Ann Burke Daly, The Automaton Olympia's Cabinet of Curiosities, Installations at The Linda Kirkland Gallery NY and 57Hope, Brooklyn," –Review by G. Baker (excerpts)
THE AUTOMATON OLYMPIA'S CABINET OF CURIOSITIES
project dates: 1995–2002
"...The suffocating sensory excess of Ann [Burke] Daly's all-white bedroom, which is filled with wax flowers that emit a sickeningly sweet aroma. A halting monologue, delivered from speakers hidden in different corners of the room, is barely audible. As you move about the installation in an attempt to catch the words, the voice seems to shift elsewhere, like a memory that fades at the exact moment of recall."
–The Los Angeles Times, Claudine Ise
"Daly unhinges the everyday by her strategies of collecting details and evidence, to produce a dreamlike collection that thrives on loss in order to break free from the confines of the domestic interior.” –S. Min, Curator, The Mourning After
"Ann Burke Daly's Stereoscopic Vision... an audio piece, but one set up for a single listener positioned to face outlines of absent photographs traced against the wall. Two different descriptions of the lost visual information played through the headphones. Though the voice on the tape was Daly's, any easy accessibility to her own narratives concerning the missing images was denied by the fact that the sound loops were of differing durations, creating endless and contradictory permutations of potential descriptions. The listener was thrown back into the privatized space of his or her own memories, constantly unfixed, however, by Daly's perpetually shifting cues."
–Narrative Urge Exhibition at Lombard-Freid Fine Arts, Artforum review by G. Baker, excerpt
“In the room, three audio recordings attempt to narrate a story about a woman named “D“. Disjunction between what is seen and what is heard in the staggered intervals of dialogue forces the viewer to inhale and take in the smells and tactility of Daly’s wax flowers and traces of collected items. The excess of smells and conflicting narratives afford a kind of decadence in which the excess of The Collector’s Dream spills over into claustrophobia and a wish to escape into the sublime.
–S.Min, Curator, The Mourning After, Exhibition at LAMAG. Catalog published by the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery (LAMAG)
–G. Volk, World Art Magazine Review “Particularly compelling was a series of small, austere, yet strangely elegant pencil drawings on tracing paper, "Building Drawings for a Machine for Electroplating the Dead", quasi-scientific studies of odd contraptions that seemed simultaneously utilitarian and bizarre.”
