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11/1/2002

Geometers

Nylon, London

Juan Cruz, Melanie Counsell, Jeremy Deadman, Mark Dean, Alex Morrison, Cornelia Parker, Carl von Weiler, Bettina von Zwehl

Curated by Simon Morrissey

geometer [Late L geometra for cl.L geometres f.Gk = land-measurer, f. as GEO + metrés measurer] 1 An expert in or student of geometry. 2 A Surveyor. 3 A moth caterpillar which moves by alternately hunching and stretching its body, as if measuring the ground; an inchworm, measuring worm or looper.

Quantifying, categorising, ordering, assessing. Our experience is continually defined and evaluated through different systems of measurement.

Geometers brings together works by artists who reference our tendency to express experience through quantitative and comparative systems. They deploy different systems - from the numerical to the spatial, the linguistic to the pictorial - but rarely conform to the parameters of measurement we are all familiar with. Instead they replace them with personalised versions. Like Inchworms, they use what is to hand to measure their world.

Mark Dean produces a reductive soundtrack for his life - a maddening 20-minute stream of every number sung in his encyclopaedic record collection. Similarly accumulative, Melanie Counsell builds a compulsive portrait of the space in which she lives and works by recording its hundreds of details for a single second each with a video camera.

Bettina von Zwehl turns her camera outward, seemingly using it to carry out a form physiognomical enquiry - recording and comparing different sitters subjected to identical conditions. Meanwhile Juan Cruz writes a story about his two cameras, one old, one new, and how they quantify and define his practice, his actions, even his memories.

It is the interchange between his sensibility as an artist and a skateboarder that recontextualizes Alex Morrison experiences and environment - he turns his domestic environment inside out by skateboarding round the interior of his flat, or finds Minimalism in architectural elements used by skaters to perform tricks.

Producing her own interchange of systems, Cornelia Parker quantifies freedom with money - stretching a silver dollar to the height of the Statue of Liberty - while Carl von Weiler measures space by beating a straight line round the walls of an empty room with a charcoal covered stick. He marks the turning of the Millennium similarly, hitting a block of paper two thousand times with the same instrument.

In sympathy, Jeremy Deadman’s office clock marks each passing second with a yelp of pain.

Image: Carl von Weiler

Nylon
10 Vyner Street
London E2 9DG
T: 44 0 20 8983 5333
F: 44 0 20 8983 5444

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