'White Magic'
Kent, UK and Brooklyn, NY
(part of 'Design for a Carnival')
80 slide carousel projection
duration: 4 mins.

Chodzko bought all the green clothes from a local charity shop, took them to NY, donating them to a thrift store in Brooklyn and bought all their red
clothes,...took these back to the UK and donated these red clothes back to the same shop where he had previously bought all their green clothes.
The key part of this work is 'outside' what you see within the projection,...that of the gradual dispersal of the UK green clothes in NY and the US red
clothes in the UK. This happens without the buyers of these
clothes knowing that they are spreading these colours. Imagine the
spread of the clothes/colours being like a coloured dye being dropped
in water....
Beyond ideas of exchange/transformation etc there are also notions of
costume/masquerade/ritual etc...It exists as a way of creating costume
for 'Design for a Carnival'. As you'll see in the projection there
are two brief glimpses of somebody (probably the artist) wearing all
the green clothes, then all the red clothes. Also there is a kind of
delirious psychedelia that punctuates the ordinariness of the spaces depicted; a disappearance into pure colour.
There is also a strange series of correspondences between the two women who deal with the clothes,..an elegance, maybe a magic...lots of clues within the images.

Simone Scarletti