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23/4/2003

Darren Almond

White Cube, London

11 miles.......from Safety

White Cube is pleased to present 11 miles.......from Safety, an exhibition of new work by British artist Darren Almond. Almond is known for his sculpture, films and photographs that reconfigure ideas of time and place and our subjective and emotional understanding of it. This exhibition will bring together two powerful and arresting new films that the artist made on location at the two world poles - Antarctica and the Arctic as well as a new numerical and meridian sculpture that bisects the gallery. The Antarctic and the Arctic are locations already imprinted in a collective consciousness as the 'ends of the earth' and as the last pure wildernesses. They appear abstract, free from social and political formations, kind of a-cultural 'states of nature' and as such they might just preserve a utopic possibility.

Almond has often made work about his own particular journeys whereby the physical and geographic process remains indelible or inherent in the final objects themselves. In 2000, the artist undertook a transatlantic journey with a flip clock, the size and shape of a standard sea container, which continuously recorded Greenwich Mean Time despite its location at the time. The work was exhibited in New York, its final destination, and housed alone in a gallery, where the viewer was confronted by the momentous sound of every slowly ticking second, with each number crashing as the clock recorded the ineffable, and terrifying passage of time.

Likewise, this exhibition will elicit a kind of cognitive, geographical mapping, played out through the sculptural and aural possibilities of the gallery space. For Almond, the architectonic rendering of the two poles is a literal and precise metaphor - the south end of the gallery will house the Antarctica film, the north, the Arctic and the sparse, electronic soundtracks of both works will create a perceptively physical experience, a journey both in and out of the various worlds.

Almond's haunting film of Antarctica has its own distinct ambience and formal rectitude. The film in itself is a kind of journey, echoing the different mental states that the artist experienced whilst on location, moving from a straightforward recording in the face of the immense and sheer physicality of the Antarctic (an arena condensed into pure elemental - solid, liquid and gas - where the latitude of human existence is removed) to a kind of blissed-out hallucinatory vision, a reversed and inverted recording of the liquid and limpid movement of ice floes, appearing like clouds, scudding across the screen and back again. At times, the picture dissolves into hazy and abstract clouds of shade and tone, appearing like a colour field painting with Antarctica becoming a huge, stained canvas.

Darren Almond has exhibited internationally with solo exhibitions at Tate Britain, Kunsthalle Zurich, Switzerland and The Renaissance Society, Chicago. The Public Art Development Trust recently commissioned a new work for the Fourth Wall project that was screened at London's South Bank in 2002.

An illustrated catalogue will be available during the exhibition. For further information please contact Honey Luard or Susannah Hyman on 020 7930 5373.

Opening Thursday 24th April 6-8pm
Open Tuesday to Saturday 10am - 6pm.

White Cube wish to thank Metro Broadcast, London for their generous assistance with this exhibition.

White Cube, 48 Hoxton Square, London N1 6PB

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