Lance Pearce, Fr Brian Keogh, Abbot at Kopua Monastery, has loaned out the bell used to call guests together for meals, 2019. Photo courtesy of the artist.

Lance Pearce While You're On Your Way – exhibition text, list of works

While You’re On Your Way addresses questions around possible roles for the title that is given for an artwork — whether that title be indicative, descriptive, allusive, expansive, essential, essentialising, controlling, complicating, playful, distractive, elusive, unreliable, or otherwise more than simply a label. The title may play various simultaneous roles depending on the work and the spectator, and their context of encounter. Absence of a title may in itself speak volumes: of omission, refusal, or asserted silence. While a title is not separate from the work of art, questions arise not only about the distinct significance of any title, but also about titling as a category of literature that serves to provoke thought, feeling, imagination. A title inevitably establishes filters and seeds trajectories for feeling and thinking in response to a work of art—for how ‘meaning’ may emerge. Yet such meanings are never determining; a title might be a provocateur but should not become the comptroller. Sensory experience is not directly translatable, even if a title appears to signify summarily. Titles develop between language’s conventions and excesses, where different registers of meaning intersect and interact, and where perception unfolds between emerging, changing and proliferating possibilities: this being the work that the spectator brings to the work of art.

This exhibition was developed in conjunction with practice-led PhD research at Auckland University of Technology.

Lance Pearce, While You're On Your Way (installation view), 2019. Photo: Sam Hartnett

Lance Pearce, Campbell’s canned soup bought in repetition, several times in different places, 2019. Photo: Sam Hartnett

Lance Pearce, Campbell’s canned soup bought in repetition, several times in different places (detail), 2019. Photo: Sam Hartnett

Lance Pearce, Campbell’s canned soup bought in repetition, several times in different places (left); Curtains de-installed in a Düsseldorf apartment during the solar eclipse of 20 March 2015 (right), 2019. Photo: Sam Hartnett

Lance Pearce, Curtains de-installed in a Düsseldorf apartment during the solar eclipse of 20 March 2015, 2019. Photo: Sam Hartnett

Lance Pearce, Curtains de-installed in a Düsseldorf apartment during the solar eclipse of 20 March 2015, 2019. Photo: Sam Hartnett

Lance Pearce, 180,000 hours of light (front); The Sun highlights the lack in each (mid right); A conductor’s baton inside a pillow (top) 2019. Photo: Sam Hartnett

Lance Pearce, 180,000 hours of light, 2019. Photo: Sam Hartnett

Lance Pearce, Fr Brian Keogh, Abbott at Kopua Monastery, has loaned out the bell used to call guests together for meals, 2019. Photo: Sam Hartnett

Lance Pearce, The Sun highlights the lack in each (left); A conductor’s baton inside a pillow (right), 2019. Photo: Sam Hartnett

Lance Pearce, The Sun highlights the lack in each, 2019. Photo: Sam Hartnett

Lance Pearce,  Bathroom scales inside a pillow (left); The Sun highlights the lack in each (right), 2019. Photo: Sam Hartnett