Visual art exhibitions and events with a platform for critical writing
Kettle's Yard, Cambridge 12 January – 3 March
Reviewed by: Stephanie Douet
'Flights of Reality' brings together new and recent works by five artists who attempt to make concrete some of the incredible norms of science. Curator Simon Groom introduces the works enticingly as "thoughts in progress, mapping out the possible, or the debris of ideas that remain in the collision between science and the everyday... reminders of the way we do not see the world".
Since 1995, Matthew Ritchie's works have relied upon an iconographic system he has devised consisting of forty-nine painterly elements or characters that can be combined in a "probably infinite" number of ways. His huge wall paintings and installations make up a parallel universe that feeds exponentially on its own growth. In Eschaton, splashed black paint is transcribed into vinyl and reassembled on two walls of the site. It is like near-legible dream-writing, emphatic and beyond consciousness.
Keith Tyson rejects the 'authentic' voice of the artist with his low-tech Artmachine, programmed to generate instructions for artists to follow in order to create new works – its multivariate proposals appear to be about everything. Tyson's accompanying diagrams, drawn and painted with vigorous crudity suggest a solution to any questions posed.
Charles Avery traces the universe's boundaries with a nervous hand – in Che Sara Sara, white words echo across an infinitely receding pinkness, a CD cover for fate or the Big Bang. Grace Weir's quantum flight from reality has a more mundane aspect in videos showing a dandelion pivoting in the grass and a tree twirling in a pavement.
Keith Wilson uses Miro-like structures made from familiar objects in an installation inspired by discoveries of asymmetry within the fish brain. A crash-barrier painted with old and poisonous paint, half-walls and eggy dribbles suggest the partially known.
Throughout this succinct exhibition, form becomes a practical tool for thoughts that wriggle free from empiricism into a visual universe that is up for grabs.
Writer detail:
STEPHANIE DOUET
is an artist and curator.
Venue detail:
No one has commented on this article yet, why not be the first?
To post a comment you need to login
Back to top