Uplifting

Once there was a saying in the art museum business, ‘one garden gnome is a garden gnome, 100 is an exhibition.’ No one we know has tested this idea as thoroughly as Campbell Paterson. Back in 2006, while in his last year at art school, he turned on a video camera, lifted his mother for one minute and 47 seconds, put her down and turned off the camera. It was an intriguing gesture, this reverse Pieta, but having done it once a year since then, eleven years later it has become something else altogether. Both Campbell Paterson and his mother have obviously grown older over the time but so too has the technology. The first ten Lifting videos came on DVDs, packed into those thin plastic gem cases, and featuring a new pic of the curtains that have served as the backdrop to each episode of the series. This year it was another shot of the curtains, the same style of gem case (some things never change), but inside the case was a tiny flash drive instead of a DVD.  And of course one flash drive is a flash drive, but another ten …