Re-used chrome car lettering adorns a carpet entry mat - demanding to be stepped over, not upon. You are entering Iain Cheesman 's, An Automatic Welcome, The Physics Room's 4 th instalment in the Sampler series. An Automatic Welcome is a multimedia installation comprised of sculptural objects which interplay with schoolboy electronics and pockets of video.

An Automatic Welcome follows Cheesman's successful exhibition, Contact at the Blue Oyster Gallery in Dunedin .  An Automatic Welcome will be on exhibition at the Physics Room with Michael Morley 's Humiliation IQ from the 9 th June to the 2 nd July. 

'It seems today more than ever, that the GUN is more prolific than the WORD.' writes Cheesman. 'Media affects the environment for us, it is clever with its associated visual devices, the image is presented as a mightier force than the word, the image is truth (unless it's a proven fake), and so what are we confronted with? Visual truths of war and violence, the good and the bad, the righteous and the wrong, a photo or film of a gun or a tank or a missile is wrapped as an unjust cause or a justified reaction'. 

Within the gallery with its controlled light, our irises trace the glow of the LED's (light emitting diodes) embedded within the artist's objects. In the altering light we make out these objects - briefcases, a table, a dog, shoe brushes - at closer inspection, words appear. A table supports a chameleon structure that is part x-ray booth, part "Noah's arc" floating architecture.

One wall supports a cut-out carpet handgun, its LED's spelling the tongue-in-cheek phrase, 'A Little Too Loaded'.  Cheesman's LED text poses questions relating to the existing plethora of media word and image; 'Does the text overpower, or enhance the images? Do the accompanying images detract from the fragmented and sensationalist information we are constantly fed?'  Or, in this predicament do we become 'inert participants who are constantly being fooled' ( Iain Cheesman ).

Off the Wall
Presto, July 2004
Sally Blundell
About Iain Cheesman

An Automatic Welcome
Sampler catalogue: Iain Cheesman
essay by Andrew Paul Wood
<available online>

This Man and a Dog
The Package
Soda Squirrel
<available online via the Physics Room Archive>