SURFACE WARP FACTOR

DIANN BAUER - JUAN BOLIVAR - GORDON CHEUNG - RICHARD DUCKER


STEWART GOUGH - SHEENA MACRAE - IAN MONROE - TOM ORMOND


THE AUBIN GALLERY

Presents

SURFACE WARP FACTOR

 

An exhibition curated by

FIELDGATE GALLERY


‘There was a kind of ghostly teenage DNA at work in the Sprawl, something that carried the coded precepts of various short-lived sub cults and replicated them at odd intervals… If the technology had been available, the Big Scientists would all have had sockets stuffed with microsofts. It was the style that mattered and the style was the same. The Moderns were mercenaries, practical jokers, nihilistic techno fetishists.’

 

The artists in this exhibition explore some of the paradigms between Modernism, geometry and science fiction, confronting utopias and dystopias. Within this matrix, human fears, fantasies and failings are set against vertiginous backdrops, information overload or sensory excess.

 

‘Then the drug hit him like an express train, a white hot column of light mounting his spine from the region of his prostate, illuminating the sutures of his skull with x-rays of short circuited sexual energy. His teeth sang in their individual sockets like tuning forks, each one pitch perfect and as clear as ethanol. His bones, beneath the hazy envelope of flesh, were chromed and polished, the joints lubricated with a film of silicon. Sandstorms raged across the scoured floor of his skull, generating waves of high thin static that broke behind his eyes, spheres of purist crystal expanding…’

 

*Excerpts from ‘Neuromancer’ by William Gibson (1984)

 

 

PRIVATE VIEW: Thursday 1st July 2010

Exhibition runs: 1st July – 25th July

Gallery open: Mon-Sat 10-7pm, Sun 11-5pm.

 

The Aubin Gallery, 64-66 Redchurch St, Shoreditch, London.

www.aubingallery.com / 0845 6048486


DIANN BAUER 


Diann Bauer’s field of work lies somewhere between painting and installation. She does large- scale sight specific paintings working either directly with the given architecture of the gallery or altering the architecture itself to both manipulate the viewing of the painting as well and using space and architecture itself to impact the viewer. The paintings are replete with detail using violent images form a number of cultures and integrates diverse visual styles and techniques. An excess of visual information in Bauer’s work generates a sense of confusion and dissolution between space, object and subject, and leaves us trying to decipher a narrative that seems graspable, but is just out of reach. Sourcing material and influence from nineteenth century Japanese woodcuts, European Baroque painting, experimental contemporary architecture and spectacular elements of cinema Bauer situates the viewer within a swirling visually complex representation of space, time and movement.  

JUAN BOLIVAR


Since graduating in 2003 Juan Bolivar has curated several exhibitions (www. trailerart.net), including TRAILER's tenth show, 'Yabadabadoo' at Cell Project Space, London and 'Eau Sauvage' at the Lucy Mackintosh Gallery in Lausanne, Switzerland. (www.lucymackintosh.ch) Bolivar's paintings deal with formalism and abstraction as a language reconfigured into fantasy, tragi-comical visions.   Born Caracas, Venezuela. Lives and works in London 

GORDON CHEUNG 


Gordon Cheung is an artist whose work captures the mood and values of our specific historical moment. He continues a long-standing artistic tradition of imagining the end of civilisation, a form of emotional and spiritual escape valve operated since man found a means to express himself. His searing visions of a civilisation veering disastrously off course, into the abyss of spectacle and consumption, moral and intellectual bankruptcy, has never felt more relevant than at the present time, when global ideologies are shifting at a rapid rate, fanned by economic and environmental crises.  Perhaps more alarming is the `post-political’ resignation which accompanies these wider developments, and the general consensus of the contemporary mass media that the return of religion has emerged as the most important factor in global politics and culture today. In his prophetic visions, underpinned by spiritual and utopian yearning, Cheung finds a compressed sign for these economic, political and spiritual crises. He is a William Blake for our times (Text by Paul Hobson Director of the Contemporary Art Society for the catalogue of solo show at the New Art Gallery Walsall 2009). Gordon is represented by Alan Cristea 

RICHARD DUCKER


Emotionally evocative without ever telling a clear story, affecting without being obvious, Ducker’s sculptures seem to be there with the mute theatricality of minimalism, yet to engage with notions of transformation. With simple formal means, they excavate fears, anxieties and desires associated with the most visceral of physical sensations - attraction and repulsion, pleasure and pain, need and self-sufficiency. The work keeps referring back to the body, a missing body we as viewers cannot help but imagine filling-in for with our own, transforming it into the ill-fitting piece of a jigsaw we are trying in vain to complete with our presence.  


 - Patrizia Di Bello, 2008, Professor , School of History of Art, Film and Visual Media, Birkbeck College

STEWART GOUGH


Stewart Gough‘s sculptures are assemblages of various mass-produced plastic objects fixed together as though Lego bricks; Dinner plates and food containers are held amongst pipe systems and machine parts, creating a distinct materially–merged–down space for a positively ironic sculptural investigation. Gough’s sculptures are temporary structures, referencing British Utopian Architecture of the 1960’s, often implying an integrated mode of transport, appearing decamped in operation as sculptural event. Through a deliberate use of size, scale, form, and graphical colour these works command phenomenal presence, and playfully slip between the grounding utility of their constituent parts and fantastic flight through sculptural and architectural ideology. Lives and works in London 

SHEENA MACRAE


Odyssey 7'00" 2006  


In a recent installation at the MAC/VAL Musée d'Art Contemporain Val-de-Marne in France, Sheena Macrae's single channel video was reflected into three giant mirrors. This installation created an infinity chamber of lines, endless stripes extending into the reflected echoing image, playing with the film’s original desires of sci-fi pseudo speculations of infinity and eternity. “The quality of the epic always resides in a single breathless moment. As if the universe were anchored by sync points, where for just one video frame, one thirtieth of a second, all of its truths are revealed in fragmented, incomprehensively overwhelming glory. It’s an indefinable sentiment, expansive beyond language, residing in the intangible realms of the metaphysical. A place not unlike your tv screen. Perhaps Sheena Macrae is a diviner; her ability to extricate the essence from the epic is uncanny…Like a drug or a diamond, a screen-size cosmos for the taking. Ergonomic, perfect, and larger than life.” -- © Patricia Ellis, excerpt from Flatpack TV, 2005

IAN MONROE


Ian Monroe renders the promise and disappointment of modernity in its own language. Deploying perspective and the viewer's expectation of volumetric space, the artist's depictions of cavernous but illusionary places propose that the project of utopian desire, however internally erroneous and eternally alienating, continues, wherein man is not only absent, but turned away. For most of us Architecture is handed down to us from above, needs are assumed, demographics consulted, and made manifest in concrete and fibre-optics, the result being tantalizingly limitless and malleable, but this is a potential energy only. We are all nomads of the lobby, the computer game, the banking system; locations through which both ourselves and our production pass, but systems whose ultimate success depends on us leaving no mark, no disturbance. On his own work Monroe comments, “Like the invisible yet immense forces in a sub- basement column of a skyscraper, there is a liminal inertia that surrounds us. Physics tells us that in any system, for every amount of order there has to be an equal disordering, and thus the future is inevitably tinged with melancholy, no matter how crisp and fluorescent.” Ian is represented by Haunch of Venison. 

TOM ORMOND

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