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18/3/2009

Ad Infinitum

Vegas Gallery, London

Curated by Ken Pratt

In recent years there has been much curatorial preoccupation with the reemergence of gothic sensibilities and dark iconography within contemporary visual art. Curators have grouped the work of a broad range of artists together and asked us to consider this tendency – with its deathly preoccupations- from various positions. Often it has been from the position in which the tendency denotes, curators postulate, an overall disillusion with positivist social aspirations. Or perhaps the tendency denotes the undeniable collapse of The Enlightenment for a second and arguably final time. Many such overviews have focused on the surface; on the aesthetic and content similarities of contemporary practices, most notably the reemergence of a dark gothic aesthetic sensibility or obvious narrative content.

Ad Infinitum – Part I, is the first in a series of projects that aims to consider this current curatorial notion from another angle, as it were. Not from the angle of works that sit readily in the category of ‘the gothic’, but from the angle of works that do not. It certainly acknowledges the tendency towards a certain disillusion or non-engagement with humanistic meta-narratives and humanist models for technological and social progress in the work of contemporary artists. However, rather than examine this tendency in the context of a common aesthetic or content drive, it seeks to turn its gaze on the ways in which themes emerge in the work of disparate contemporary artists whose work shares little obvious similarity in practice, content, form or aesthetics.

What their work does share – and in some cases, this even extends to the visually dominant tendency towards the gothic- is a certain disillusion, questioning or even disinterest in the sense that entirely humanistic narratives of meaning remain sufficient or tenable to account for the contemporary condition. Their seemingly unrelated work nonetheless suggests that explanations for human existence and its purpose are insufficiently satisfied by philosophies or doctrines that contain their explications within the realm of the human, the rational, the scientific and technological.

Private View: 19 March 18:30

Vegas Gallery
64 Redchurch Street - London
Open Wednesday-Saturday 12.00-18.00
Free admission

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