The universe began with chaos and man contrary to nature has since tried to arrange the world in an effort to understand it. Alex Bunn's work can be seen as an attempt to reconcile the various models, modes and statuses we employ to navigate and engage with the cosmos without compromising it's natural disorder.
“Some say that the universe is made so that when we are about to understand it; it changes into something even more incomprehensible. And then there are those who say that this has already happened.” Douglas Adams
The universe began with chaos and man contrary to nature has since tried to arrange the world in an effort to understand it. Alex Bunn’s work can be seen as an attempt to reconcile the various models, modes and statuses we employ to navigate and engage with the cosmos without compromising it’s natural disorder. Fascinated with the converging paradigms of science, the supernatural, the superstitious and the absurd, his work meditates on the subjectivity of truth and its fluxing point of reference.
He uses science as a springboard to his imagination, discarding more formal representations to produce a body of work that playfully manipulates and metamorphosis’s known objects to produce unsettling combinations. Through reclassification, and the rearrangement of order, he acknowledges scientific methods, but the results are more akin to that of a “mad Scientist” than the clean and precise methods of a modern technician.
In an era of Biotechnological modification, his sculpture Quabrid imaginatively explores the reshaping of the human form. The bust is formed by using multiple high-resolution medical scan topography of different tissues of the body and is then fused with architectural components to create a unique hybrid portrait.
Dr Caterina Albano senior curator for Artakt described the work as provoking: “….an eerie feeling of déjà vu, recognisable yet strangely unfamiliar….Far from realism, Quabrid is a conceptual artifact that, not unlike early anatomical images, is a contrived and highly rhetorical representation of the contemporary biotechnological gaze”
Redolent of Victorian displays of biological research, his photographs continue to combine the organic with the synthetic, to produce beautiful, yet disturbing images. Almost accidental in appearance they are imbued with a tragedy and can perhaps be viewed as contemporary vanitas compositions.
Alex Bunn has recent exhibited at the Royal Institute of Great Britain, Candid Art Trust and The Victoria & Albert Museum.
Preview: 12th June 2009 6.30 - 9pm
Another Roadside Attraction Gallery
Bayford Street - London
Opening hours Friday Sunday 12-6pm
Free admission