The curatorial collaboration is key in the work of Parick Pound, given that the roles of "artist" and "curator" can not be distinguished in their activity. In Photography and air Patrick Pound becomes the collaborator of Susan Bright, guest curator of PHotoESPAÑA 2019 with the program "Déjà vu?".
This collaboration puts the commissioner in an unknown situation. According to Susan Bright: "Personally working with an artist whose activity is curatorial brings something quite new to me, since then what am I? It will be a meeting that will allow a continuous and dynamic reconceptualization of the relationships between all the parties involved in the process. We are collaborators in a field in which the attributions are uncertain."
"Photography and Air" includes a collection of found photographs, each of which encloses the idea of air. This, in itself, is a conceptual notion given that air is something that can not be photographed. Instead of taking pictures, the Australian artist of New Zealand origin Patrick Pound acquires all his photographs on eBay. Obsessively collect a set of family images, archive photographs of missing newspapers and promotional film frames.
Afterwards, he resumed his work where the other photographers left him. Collecting becomes art thanks to curatorial practice, which establishes associations between photographs through thematic exhibitions in which air is a recurring theme. Photographs disconnected from their original context are freed from the story associated with them and become a tool - or a piece of a puzzle - in the creation of a new context that is, at the same time, arbitrary and coherent.
In addition, Pound has also entered the database of the Lázaro Galdiano Museum in search of pieces that enclose an idea of air, from a painting of a passing cloud to a medal representing a globe or a mirror surrounded by wind instruments. 19 pieces of the museum will be presented, among them, Fiesta de toros en el aire, by Isidro Carnicero and Modo de volar, by Goya.
"Photography and Air" is a brief vernacular history of photography and a poetic index of the air. As William Carlos Williams said: "There is no idea but in things". Pound puts it another way: "Collecting is ordering your thoughts through things."
