Patrick Pound
New Zealand / Australia b.1962

The air lock 2022
Photographs and objects from the artist’s collection and the QAGOMA Collection
Everything here has some relation to the idea of air.

The air lock 2022 is like a giant puzzle, inviting us to consider how the invisible subject ‘air’ can be held in a myriad of ways. Patrick Pound is an avid collector. He gathers artworks from both his own collection and, for this work, QAGOMA’s holdings. Paintings in gilded frames share space with an asthma inhaler, an air hockey puck and other odds and ends, all are carefully selected.

Pound collects and categorises. Mostly, he buys old photographs and objects online that he arranges in chains or constellations of common meaning. Holiday snapshots, bronze sculptures, toys and famous paintings: ‘They’re all treated equally’, he states, ‘which is not to say that the objects have equal value’. For the game he proposes to work, the assorted objects must be given a ‘sabbatical’ from their usual task.

‘I’ve always liked the idea of capturing something you can’t see, or trying to come to terms with it, come to grips with it’, says Pound. A subject such as air must be grasped through the involvement of other, more concrete images and objects.