Cyrus Shroff

My work centres around an affection for the distinctive swagger involved in nineteenth century personal collections such as the John Soane Museum; their suppression, superimposition or regeneration of places, cultures and auras into a personal collection, through a framing or re-framing, an extraction or a squeezing together, is something my practice looks to mimic and celebrate.

My practice involves a successive appropriation and mediation form; an art history deliberately assigned with the burden of being ever-expansive and over-inclusive - a broad church that assimilates archaeology and ethnography, ancient art, prehistoric ritual, design and the ornament, religious iconography and modernist materiality. This mediation is enacted through repeated gestures of selection, cropping, reproducing, compressing, editing, fragmenting, quoting, locating, framing and staging.

I am interested in the perceived authority or autonomy of the historical art-object as we encounter it; along with a unique time-signature or tense embedded within an object through its own hyper-specific staging, within the overarching proposition of a secular or religious institutional space.

The work might be organised or edited in groups of paintings, crafted objects and ready-made images; groups that function as self-reflexive sets that sample swatches or scraps of language or events populating our history of making, and the quasi-religious sacrality these being with them. These sets embody the edit, of personal selection and forced hierarchies, that might point towards a vast archive, fragments that allude to ideas of idealised, navigable trajectories that serve to interpret some mythical whole.