calendario eventi  :: 

X

4/3/2013

Plural

WW Gallery, London

curated by BREESE LITTLE

Joe Biel, Suki Chan, Tom Hackney, Rowena Hughes,
NASA (Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmidt) and Sam Zealey

Human aspiration can be reduced to archetypes, templates or models of enclosed internal logic. The lunar landings, which took place from 1969 - 1972 present a compelling starting point from which to compare and contrast alternate examples of this phenomenon. Ostensibly about space exploration, the Apollo programme represented a meeting of political, technological and ontological paradigms which created a global media spectacle. Assumed to be the herald of a new age, the motives, and cost, of the Apollo programme have since been questioned. For this exhibition, six vintage NASA photographs will establish a context within which to view the works of five international contemporary artists, each of whom present divergent models of human aspiration.

Joe Biel’s large scale pencil on paper work Compound (2007) presents a melancholic landscape strewn with seemingly unrelated household ephemera. In the centre of the composition a house stands in ruins, while nearby a large sculpted bust has a broken nose and lies awkwardly on the ground. Comparable to the lunar surface in its grey, monotone appearance, the image betrays the eerie atmosphere of a desolate, abandoned landscape devoid of human life but covered with its artefacts.

Sleep Talk, Sleep Walk (2009), an immersive, hypnotic video installation by Suki Chan, posits an understanding of London as a living organism with a beating pulse, addressing its natural rhythms and the urban paradigm. An unforgettable segment at the beginning of the film uses time lapse recording to capture the momentum of the city. The work continues to record the cold isolation of the City, woven with the human stories behind London’s financial district.

Tom Hackney’s Chess Paintings (2009 – present) use found data - the records of chess games played by Marcel Duchamp - to create carefully controlled, gridded abstract works. Hackney is particularly interested in the idea of inhabiting and reactivating historical material to produce a painted index of pure thought. The resulting works marry the enclosed, self-regulating structures of chess, reactivated found historical material and a precise, almost clinical application of paint.

The work of Rowena Hughes combines the use of chance and process based abstraction with complex mathematical formulae. A typical example of this is her on-going body of work (2010 – present) in which the artist screen prints abstract figures onto found book pages, often with large scale, black and white reproductions of grandiose architecture. In doing so, Hughes creates a slippage between the screen printed intervention, the depicted space of the photograph and the now activated space of the found book page.

Sam Zealey’s practice is characterised by a scientific interest in processes which form the natural world and his sculptures often take a phenomenon rooted in geology or physics as a starting point. The artist uses an approach he calls 'Degenerate Science' and 'Plagiarising Nature'. These terms for his practice have evolved into two core undercurrents of 'The Matriarch' and 'Pangaea'. Zealey uses these concepts to filter the world around him and reflects upon it through his practice.

For further press enquiries please contact Francesca Brooks on francesca.a.brooks@gmail.com

Preview 6-9pm Tues 5 March

WW Gallery
34/35 Hatton Garden - London EC1N 8DX
Open Weds - Fri 11 - 6pm; Sat 11 - 4pm

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