Just Looking was an explorative project between artists Rhiannon Hunter, Ugne Dainiute and Ursula Pelczar into collaborative and solo looking in strange times. The 5 month research project resulted in a window exhibition in a disused commercial display unit in ‘trendy’ Deptford Market Yard, South East London, a website and online screensaver.
Undertaken at the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic, three strangers meet through screens and throughout the project, communicate remotely, meeting for the first time to install the co-created work.
With the gigantic pause button that had been pressed on our physical needs to be anywhere, we found ourselves locked in a pendular state of looking. Just looking became a pro-active state of digesting and discovering the textures, signs and change that surrounded us.
We sought pleasures in just looking at crisp newly formed blossoms hovering in a halo of blue lights or clusters of moss spawning from the rim of a neglected car window.
Just Looking is passive and unapologetic. Scorned as time wasting, it is a portal to imagine, a space for daydream and the pure mystery of unknowing in order to know.
Just Looking is despondent and confined, mediated through liquid crystal displays and lenses of fused silica and sand.
Just Looking is to browse, to be non-comital, to indulge in orientating oneself amongst one’s desires. It is a private space of sorting surplus from value, and of seeking a window through which to be part of that on which we look.
Just Looking was a mechanical image clock (documentation above) that played with the onlooker’s attention to participate in the act of Just Looking. The longer one participated in Just Looking they were rewarded with a new combination of images that offer up a story of sequential moments, images frozen in to print by unseen authors in different locations bound together by a trail of Zoom meetings and emails. The visible mechanics both charm and beguile in their simplicity in a world accustomed to the workings hidden behind a screen.
Just Looking was an online screensaver (documentation above) that seduced the viewer through disorientation and repetition. Through excess it invited one to disband with productive time and become captivated by the alluring fall of image after image and to succumb to Just Looking.
