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above: Gosia Wlodarczak (2010) 400 HOURS, 800 panels, pigment ink on paper, panel size: 29.7 x 21. 400 installation at RMIT University Project Space/Spare Room, Melbourne, collaborative project with Longin Sarnecki, curated by Stephen Gallagher, 09 — 26 March 2010; right from the top: 400, process of installation (image linked to: composite image of full installation: left 400 HOURS by Gosia Wlodarczak, right: 400 DAYS by Longin Sarnecki); Gosia Wlodarczak (2010) 400 HOURS detail, pigment ink on paper (image linked to: 400 HOURS close up); Gosia Wlodarczak and Longin Sarnecki (2010) 400 installation, storage boxes.

"For 400 the gallery becomes a time capsule, the combined diary documenting an extended moment spent together by Gosia Wlodarczak and Longin Sarnecki. It is a window into the private interactions between the two, presenting through drawing and text recordings the time spent with each other in the daily rituals of their domestic environment. Wlodarczak periodically draws, capturing her immediate visual surrounding in 800 panels of half hour sketches. Each page comprises of varying densities of layered contour line. Simultaneously Sarnecki notes the activity of 400 DAYS in diary entries that form marching rows of text.

400 creates an ambiguous zone between the hand-drawn and machine-printed. It documents the present moment and the memory of that moment through image and story. It creates a zone where both the drawing and the text become blurred when displayed en masse to cover the gallery walls, floor to ceiling (...)

Wlodarczak's 400 HOURS is an archive of moments frozen by the repetition of human glances and transformed into materiality through the layering of line. In each of the 800 panels is the building of shapes or fragments of shapes that shift between the abstract and the representational - her immediate 'real time' environment (...)

Within 400 HOURS there is the identification of familiar objects buried within the natural/organic rhythm of overlaying lines. Similarly the text of Sarnecki's 400 DAYS, without the understanding of Polish required to read the text, becomes simply that - text. Rhythmic row-upon-row of font, spacing, sentences and paragraphs blend to become a grey area that the subconscious grasps at for identifiable shapes. The work is both a diary and an organic landscape formed by text.

But the reading of the text of 400 DAYS reveals much more, for it is the documentation of moments in time spend between the two, the shared personal interactions, situations and conversations of the two and of the others that have entered into their domestic space, along with the mundane, like the simple 'things to do' that are needed to make days productive.

This collaborative project which documents the 400 DAYS and 400 HOURS of being together forms an en masse capturing of time, a registry of the everyday. It is both a love story and a life story."

Stephen Gallagher

To read the full essay: RMIT Project Space/Spare Room: 400