Abstract
ALEXANDER JAMES POLLARD, ANDREA MEDJESI, DAN HOWARD-BIRT, GRANT FOSTER, LAURIE COLE, LEE JOHNSON, LUKE BURTON, NICKY HIRST, PUSHKA, SCOTT McCRACKEN, SUKEY SLEEPER, TOM FARTHING, VIRGINIA VERRAN
Curated by Scott McCracken
26th September – 6th October 2024
Worlds Still on a Wire is a continuation of and a return to a previous exhibition titled Worlds on a Wire in 2022. The updated exhibition will be installed on a domestic, working canal boat rather than within the typical gallery context of white walls, strip lighting and on land.
The title is a variation on Rainer Werner Fassbender’s 1973 television serial World on a Wire (Welt am Draht), itself an adaptation of Daniel F. Galouye’s novel Simulacron-3. A world on a wire is a precarious situation. The image of some mass entity hanging there, swinging and spinning suspended only by a single wire, acts as a metaphor for the way artists engage with making. Being aboard a boat feels precarious in its own way; there is the potential to move off in any direction, but also of slowly sinking, of how comfortable and known it feels to be on firm ground. Art relies on a sort of accepted artificiality. What we see is not really what we see – we are looking at a construction. But it is not simply about world-building, it is also about a world-unbuilding. A taking apart and a reassembling where parts don’t fit so neatly together, where the absurd and the
quotidian, the diurnal and the nocturnal, the telescopic and the microscopic, can sit together in a kind of unifying tension. An unworlding. Paintings and sculptures have their own inherent ‘supernaturality’. A process of transformation happens in the making of the work. It never fully becomes the thing it claims or attempts to picture or show. Nor does it simply remain as material and matter. Something else is happening. A continual becoming.
The protagonist in Philip K Dick’s novel Time Out of Joint, Ragle Gumm, has a strange experience when he misremembers the light cord in his own bathroom:
“Why did I remember a light cord? he asked himself. A specific cord, hanging a specific distance down, at a specific place. I wasn’t groping around randomly. As I would in a strange bathroom. I was hunting for a light cord I had pulled many times.” The light cord described above is itself a wire - perhaps not too dissimilar to the wires hanging in the gallery that are attached to the works - serves as a reminder of the difference between illumination and darkness, between an inside and an outside. Or more accurately between an inside and another inside.
“Artworks are insides”
Phil Ford
Curated by Scott McCracken
26th September – 6th October 2024
Worlds Still on a Wire is a continuation of and a return to a previous exhibition titled Worlds on a Wire in 2022. The updated exhibition will be installed on a domestic, working canal boat rather than within the typical gallery context of white walls, strip lighting and on land.
The title is a variation on Rainer Werner Fassbender’s 1973 television serial World on a Wire (Welt am Draht), itself an adaptation of Daniel F. Galouye’s novel Simulacron-3. A world on a wire is a precarious situation. The image of some mass entity hanging there, swinging and spinning suspended only by a single wire, acts as a metaphor for the way artists engage with making. Being aboard a boat feels precarious in its own way; there is the potential to move off in any direction, but also of slowly sinking, of how comfortable and known it feels to be on firm ground. Art relies on a sort of accepted artificiality. What we see is not really what we see – we are looking at a construction. But it is not simply about world-building, it is also about a world-unbuilding. A taking apart and a reassembling where parts don’t fit so neatly together, where the absurd and the
quotidian, the diurnal and the nocturnal, the telescopic and the microscopic, can sit together in a kind of unifying tension. An unworlding. Paintings and sculptures have their own inherent ‘supernaturality’. A process of transformation happens in the making of the work. It never fully becomes the thing it claims or attempts to picture or show. Nor does it simply remain as material and matter. Something else is happening. A continual becoming.
The protagonist in Philip K Dick’s novel Time Out of Joint, Ragle Gumm, has a strange experience when he misremembers the light cord in his own bathroom:
“Why did I remember a light cord? he asked himself. A specific cord, hanging a specific distance down, at a specific place. I wasn’t groping around randomly. As I would in a strange bathroom. I was hunting for a light cord I had pulled many times.” The light cord described above is itself a wire - perhaps not too dissimilar to the wires hanging in the gallery that are attached to the works - serves as a reminder of the difference between illumination and darkness, between an inside and an outside. Or more accurately between an inside and another inside.
“Artworks are insides”
Phil Ford
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Publication status | Published - 25 Sept 2024 |
| Event | Worlds still on a wire - Canal Boat Contemporary Gallery, London, United Kingdom Duration: 26 Sept 2024 → 6 Oct 2024 |