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The images in the exhibition,  The Aureolin Collection - Sites ,   are heavily cropped sections from documentary images of some of Margaret Roberts' site-specific installations made since 1991. Encountering one of Roberts' installations is to encounter the architectural fabric of the museum or industrial or domestic building, (or more complicatedly, both, when a museum or gallery space is occupying a building designed for a pre-existing use), at the expense, so to speak, of one's expectations of finding the determinable artwork comfortably framed within the architectural / institutional site. (This ironical character of Roberts' practice is not compatible with phenomenological readings of this work - readings in praise or dismissal). Presenting documentary images of the installations, even though striking images are possible (as attested to especially by Chris Fortescue's photographic work on many of the installations), and also the fact that at one level the installations prescribe certain view-points, which in rendering a lived-in architectural environment temporarily two- dimensional--as in the series of works in which geometric shapes or shapes of architectural features like doors, walls and floors, snap into alignment when viewed from certain positions in the room--also, however, present a problem when the codes of photography confirm and reinforce our expectations of locating and determining, in its unicity, the work of art within its enclosing frame--in this case the distancing, framing, objectifying, and enabling of a right to inspection characteristic of the apparatus of photography and its related discourses--when so much of the work of the installations was to confound those expectations. (The codes and conventional rhetoric of photography reinforce in this case a determination of either, or both, the singular unique work of art as the graphic content of the intervention in the architectural space--and related "natural" atmospherics--or as the photograph itself, newly aestheticised in a production process in which the installation would be only the awkward, prosaic and intermediary stage, a means to an end).      So the photographs are restaged in this exhibition. The main and central focus in these images is no longer the intervention into the architectural fabric of the site represented in the entirety or semi-entirety of a view attempting to represent the whole, but is now a passage through and beyond the immediate site, passing by way of, and giving focus to, the architectural details and parerga which, made prominent in the experience of the original installation (through interventions that emptied out any focus on a central determinable locus of interest), now have a re-focussed attention on their peripheral - and permeable - delimitatory character.    And what of the photographic prints themselves, do they become aestheticised images; the uncanny misprison  of an absent art work? But here the passage through is also a passage to the beyond of an other (the natural other of the architecture's culturalness given in sunlight on leaves or the natural shadow of night), and to an absent origin opening up at the centre of the image, but an origin that is not that of the original installation but another origin, giving rise to the question of which could be said to have been created or planned first, the installation or the so-called "cropped" image, and also giving rise to, again, an irony at the heart of the artwork: the sense of "an origin," so central to the aesthetic determination of the unicity of the work of art that one has in regard to these images, is not the original installation artwork, of which the image would remain the documentary substitute--transparently represented-- nor even the more or less modified representation of what could be purported as the origin--or whole, in truth--of the original installation, (in it's installation, as opposed to its representation) but another origin, one that "appears" only after everything else has already occurred--the conceiving of the installation, its execution, the taking of documentary photographs, and the cropping of those photographs.      These images function on their own as de-articulations of the representational conventions of the apparatus of the camera and it's internal logic of framing effects, but there is also an external edge to the frame as well, which engages with the architectural and institutional site of the museum space, and signals a liminal shift from one order of cultural apperception to another (each with somewhat singular histories not reducible to the other): from the order of objects on display, to the order of architectural container for those objects.    The (new) absent origin at the centre of these images affects this other order of discourse, representation and histories. The origins this order seeks to display (especially in the context of the documentation artwork, or the retrospective of an artist's work), are those of works of art judged and determined as to their aesthetic value and place in a historical development, but here in these images that origin has been lost as an origin as such (there remains partial, indexical and indicative traces of the original installations), and has been rendered absent. But in being lost as origin, the creation of "new" artworks that result signals the appearance of a new origin, but this time an appearance coming to us from the future (as a promise?) and not from a past present historically articulated.    The images then, resemble "original" art-works - with their "own" sense of origin, their own past, present and future, more then they do documentary images of site-specific works. But they also still document the work, or more exactly, the processes, activities, details and partial views of the work, as well as indicating, documenting and recalling the event of the work (through the registration of time and place in the titles of each piece). The shift here from documentation to the sense of an (essentially) new original work moves forward and back as one seeks to make a determination one way or the other, and is ultimately undecidable. This undecidability--which is also an irony--affects the representational and discursive site of the museum, for how can works that are undecidable (and not just indeterminate, as indeterminacy is infinitely recoverable for, and is the essence of, aesthetic determinations), as to their nature as documentary images or original works in their own right, be placed, presented and displayed as uniquely determinable artefacts in a properly determinable historical trajectory, in other words, how can they be subject to the work of the museum? The architectural site of the museum has its own rhetorical organisational strategies that support the discourses and representational strategies of its codes - the presentation of objects for a subtly controlled perambulatory subject given the illusion of freedom with large open spaces and objects of "choice" carefully located in a space at once "neutral" but also--comfortably and safely--figuring a world in which other worlds can be presented and represented, organised, archived, and explicated.   The lights on the floor in this exhibition--as well as the normal ceiling lights--illuminate the works on the walls, and as, in partial fashion, they reflect the ceiling lights of museum spaces, they repeat in reversed fashion a certain organizational strategy of the museum's codes: that of the complete yet generally out-of-sight and invisible, bath of light that gives the illusion of rendering every object in it completely accessible (without any shadows, or uneven areas of illumination) in a space of pure visibility. But here the lights don't provide this total illumination - they are spotlights, in everyday tungsten (yellowish) light and are themselves the kind of lights used externally rather than interior or gallery lighting - and they don't reflect architecturally incorporated and designed ceiling lights in that they are simply placed on the floor with extension cords loosely and randomly providing the electrical connection. In this their organisation reflects the characteristics of the materials (ordinary electrical leads for connecting and powering electrical equipment on the floor), and in this don't give the sense of "walking-on-the-ceiling" that a "designed," electrician- fitted lighting array set out on the floor would have. So in this sense there isn't the situation of a simple reversal (an uncanny turning upside down of spatial experience and architectural hierarchies) but a doubling and re-registering of the use of lighting in museum spaces. What is usually singular, neutral, natural, and invisible, has through a process of doubling become visible, prosaic and allegorical of the museum space itself. Stephen Sullivan, 2003