Page 39 - ABILITY Magazine -Cedric Yarbrough Issue

“On darker nights, or lighter nights, or bright mornings” - Bill Oddie
“Hold my hand” - Gail Porter
Martirosyan: As I sit here, they all look like they’re looking at me. Do you see it, too?
Martirosyan: The audio adds another intriguing layer to the story.
Tyrimos: Mm-hmm.
Tyrimos: Yes. I put the audio on a loop, the idea being that you can pop on the headphones, listen to a few seconds’ worth, and then move on. During the exhibition, which ran for one week, I noticed so many people would listen to the entirety of them; they want- ed to hear everything the subject had to say. On aver- age people spend about seven seconds looking at a painting in a gallery before moving on, but with this exhibit you’re kind of forced to stop, look directly at the person and listen. In a real conversation, you don’t get uninterrupted time to talk, do you? But it’s like they’ve been allowed the chance to speak freely without judgment.
(laughter)
Martirosyan: You mentioned in your gallery that you had set up audio files with little narratives. How did you do that?
Tyrimos: For the purpose of this show, I wanted to meet every person who sat for me and to take a series of photographs and sketches of them. But then I quickly realized the story behind what they’d experi- enced was too important not to share. So the paintings have basically turned into art installations. Accompa- nying each painting is an audio recording. Formally or informally, I interviewed each person and then edited it down.
So I’m going to play you a couple of the audio files. This is Mark’s. He’s a journalist for The Guardian and also an author; he speaks about what he describes as his nervous breakdown and the first moments of the symptoms:
So as you’re looking at the paintings, you can put on a pair of headphones. There’s one for each of them, and you can listen to them talk openly about what they’ve been through. I was quite surprised by how revealing they were. I think it’s because I have a personal connection with the issue. I’m not a member of the press. I’m not a charity. They knew what I was trying to get across with this art.
Mark: Things had been building up for me for a number of weeks beforehand, just a few weeks in which I just really hadn’t felt like myself. My vision was strange. My concen- tration wasn’t there. Things were swimming. And I had this permanent sort of knot or something in my stomach. It was around my 40th birthday. I always said life begins at 40, but not for me. I even sang a song on that day about life beginning at 40, but for most of the time on that boat I
ABILITY 39