Mapping - Adrian Gollner

Who am I?
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In the yard of Alice, located in Woodbrook, Port of Spain, a video projector is set up around a few chairs and tables. This is rather an impromptu space for the guest speaker Adrian Gollner.

Mr. Gollner is here in Trinidad as part of his two month residency from the Canada Council for the Arts. Ottawa based, this is a man with many roots of which his grandmother can be traced to Trinidad. He says, it is one of the key factors of his proposal being excepted.

Mr. Gollner begins his presentation with a sideshow and his influences particularly of war and aerial mapping. The Cuban missile crisis in 1962 forges a sculpture into metal decoding the transcripts of Nikita Khrushchev and John F. Kennedy's stance over the deployment of nuclear missiles in Cuba. This is transcribed into morse code producing a type of circuity as a relief. He also produces imagery from the Cold War including the U2 spy plane incident and the Atom bomb. In all, to merge political propaganda with the nuances of public advertising.

In Trinidad and Tobago, the artist finds himself decoding his family tree using vinyl to mark his ancestry line. He also compiles a graph devising the randomness in winning and losing numbers from a local national lottery. In January, fellow Canadian Artist Paul Fortin also used the vinyl material to map a grid of wrought iron burglar proofing motifs.

What is noted with Adrian Gollner's work from Trinidad is how sterile it is, other than the raw video footage panning the electrical lines from a maxi taxi, the warmth of the island seems removed and reduced to a statistic plotting out put.