There is an artist's talk on our current group show, No Man's Land this Thursday, 28th April. Curators Brendan Murphy, Cherie Marie Veiderveld, and Simon - Rueben White and artists Simon Read and Vytis Puronas will be discussing the concepts, including J G Ballard, concerning the show.No Man’s Land is defined as an unoccupied area, land that is unowned and uninhabited (and possibly undesirable) and the ambiguous region between two categories or states or conditions (usually containing some features of both) where there is still a twilight zone, the tantalizing occurrences that are probably noise but might possibly be a signal.
Paul Virilio’s Dromology, whereby the increasing velocity of our global culture is driven by advances in technology and military innovation, suggests that reality is no longer defined by time and space. The high speed and seamless stream of culture that blurs experience allowing little or no opportunity to pause brings into existence the paradox of being everywhere at the same time and also being nowhere at all. A simple binary equation of reality and representation is no longer sufficient to decipher what we perceive.
In The Art of Travel, Alain de Botton echoes the correlation between what we experience and perceive and how this dominates our thought processes. He notes that journeys into expansive, alien or uninhabited spaces can bring about the opportunity for uninhibited reflection. “Large thoughts emerge from large views and new thoughts from new places”. All the works selected for this exhibition establish a littoral space, the region between high and low tide, or inbetween
space through contrast, defamiliarization or dislocation to slow things down and
present possibilities for open thought and uninhibited contemplation.
Marcin Gajewski’s untitled video loop presents an ambiguous and atmospheric sepia-toned landscape. This potentially historic rural scene appears frozen in time and possessed by a group of figures, themselves displaced and autonomous, through their fluid and hypnotic movement towards the viewer. This contrast between landscape and figures invites a myriad of possible reveries without offering a familiar resolution.
Brendan Murphy’s paintings evoke the colours and topography of the earth taken from aerial photographs, contrasting the intimacy of paint with the emptiness of virtual displacement geometries that are normally applied to the backgrounds of increasingly sophisticated video games to promote and enhance a sense of reality. Emphasizing this surrogate experience and sense of cultural foreclosure, these dislocated and sombre landscapes hover between representation and abstraction to become sites for unrestricted contemplation.
Vytis Puronas & Simon Reuben White collaborate on a sound installation that explores the white noise and static between short wave radio stations and the coded sequences various clandestine networks broadcast around the globe. Submerged within the layers of sound and echoes is the correspondence on cassette-tape, found locally on the street, between an anonymous man and a relative describing his life in the far-east, producing dislocated aural postcards from another time.
Simon Read’s series of panoramic photographic sequences, captured with camera and apparatus specifically constructed for the purpose, describes the view from the littoral space of a boat floating offshore which is in turn, mediated by the swell of the tide and the prevailing weather conditions. The resulting images question our relationship with representation and orthodox photography, eschewing what Roland Barthes portrayed as intertextuality, to alter how we interface with our experience and expectations.
Jeni Snell’s Inflatable Fortress draws from a rich history of military architecture, military innovations in pneumatic design and the insurgence of popular culture on mainstream society to establish its multi-layered meaning. In isolation the inflatable bunker functions as an independent sculptural form dislocated from it’s coastal origins as a defense against invading forces and uses the language of the bouncy-castle to create a playful yet serious work that undermines the inherent meaning of the represented object.
Elaine Tribley combines a billboard to advertise an artwork yet to come with photographs of the billboard at different sites and locations. Under the alias of Aileen Liberty, she blends the visual and textual device of "mise-en-abyme", a dream within a dream, to draw attention to the fictive environment of the gallery as the location and determiner of art and to author a multitude of suggestive fictions which speak to us from empty and ambiguous landscapes.
Brendan Murphy, 2009
| Date : | 28 avril 2009 |
| Heure : | 19:30 - 21:00 |
| Lieu : | |
| Adresse : | White Post Lane |
| Téléphone : | 020853360802 |
| Courriel : | |
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