The Saturday before last I went to see Tom Pope’s exhibition at the old Police Station when he was doing a talk on all of it.

One of his main goals with the exhibition was to make the Archive more interactive, two of ways he did this were masks and badges. By taking images from the Archive and making masks, he would be able to take photos of people wearing them, and having a bit of fun with them. The badges have been given out to anyone that made them, by making badges from the photos and allowing the people to keep them, you have little bits of the archive which people sort of own.

For the badges, he would print out a photo of the Archive and stick it on a piece of paper, he would then get each person to flip a plastic disk, the size needed for the badges, and then cut out the circles from the picture, the only way the pictures could be re-pieced is if all the people with the badges from that image got together and fitted them back. So whilst the images have holes in them, people carry round the missing pieces, which have no context unless seen with the original image.

When looking through the archive Tom found a photographer, whose photos were originally rejected from the archive, and he saw that he very often took three of the same photo, and so Tom made it into a little bit of a game. He had a plinth, painted blue, (which was a reference to John Baldessari) which he would drop each photo onto from a metre up, he would do this every day of the exhibition. Where the photos would land, they would stay for the day, if they landed off the plinth, they wouldn’t be included in the exhibition that day. This is a kind of experiment with the best-of-three idea the photographer came up with.

Tom Pope said there are quite a lot of references to John Baldessari within his work. For example, in the last room we saw, he hd taken images from the archive of people doing high jump, he then took some of his own of people doing high jump and limbo, and lined up the poles in all of them, so you would have some people going above the line and other people going below the line.

The presentation of this came from John Baldessaris “Throwing three balls in the air to get a straight line”  Where he would, you guessed it, throw three balls in the air to try and make a straight line.

This inspired Toms choices for presentation, likewise Tom made many other references to other photographers within this exhibition.