Posts Categorized: Exhibitions
‘Everything Is Connected’, Alice Anderson
HS Projects presented ‘Everything Is Connected’, an exhibition of Alice Anderson’s recent sculptural works made after performances.
Alice Anderson’s practice is an exploration of memory in the digital world, she ‘records’ objects with copper thread through her sculptures and performances. For the last ten years, Anderson has explored the physical and physiological mutations that transform our world. The artist has her own way of memorising objects and architecture through movement, contrasting the ‘outsourcing’ of memory by digital processes.
Anderson transforms virtual data into tactile forms to re-create a new physical relationship with objects and spaces through ritual performances. It is an act of ‘memorising’ and a means of understanding the world around her, keeping hold of the physicality of objects, as more and more of our life becomes subsumed by digital technology. As the artist says, ‘I always worry to break or lose an object, therefore I have established rules: when one of the objects around me is likely to become obsolete or is lost in the stream of our lives, I ‘memorise’ it with thread before it happens.’
It is Anderson’s own method of ‘memorising’ objects and architectural elements in 3D. ‘Lift’, 2015, ‘Ladders’, 2014 and ‘Door Frame’, 2011 have all gone through this process of entwining an object, mummifying it, recording it for posterity. By measuring an object, obtaining its data and ‘marking’ it into copper wire, Anderson presents us with a ‘recorded’ lift, a ‘recorded’ door frame and ‘recorded’ fire ladders.
Anderson appears to record ‘the physical and material world’ whilst digitisation takes over. ‘I started ‘recording’ objects and architecture in 2010. I believe that this action is one of the instinctive consequences of memory going digital. There isn’t any nostalgia in this approach. It is simply a physical interaction with the present: the digital world gives more freedom, information and creativity, but how are we meant to cope with it? This revolution is just beginning and it’s already affecting the whole of society and all its current models – economic, social and ideological. Our everyday life already sources a lot of its basic reflexes from automated information or service-sharing, through Google, Wikipedia, Uber and so on, so I have to find my own methods of slowing down, of keeping a sort of intimacy with the world surrounding me, of understanding, learning and memorising differently. It’s a paradox, but the more my everyday existence fills up with digital data about the things around me, the greater my need to get to grips with their material, physical data’.
Those actions typically combine primitive and modern, strong and vulnerable, one-off chance and ritual repetition. We might call the result Post-Digital. Certainly it is informed – indeed, troubled – by knowledge of the digital alternative, and goes beyond it to seek new haptic relationships between people and the physical world. Anderson’s post-digital rituals give us a directness of engagement, which a photo in a file cannot. Yet her practice might also be seen, taken as a whole, to be mourning the loss of the pre-digital world, to yearn for the times when rituals were charged with maximum power and objects were restricted to their original selves.
‘Everything Is Connected’ was at Howick Place from May 2013 – March 2014.
‘Tilted’ , Tania Kovats
HS Projects presented a group of works by acclaimed British artist Tania Kovats. Kovats is renowned for producing sculptures, large scale installations and temporal works which explore our experience and understanding of landscape, and finds in the natural world both her subject and material. She approaches the natural environment both in terms of identifiable places – sites that can be mapped, named, inhabited and scrutinised – and as matter with properties that can be subjected to external forces and potential transformations.
Kovats’ barnacle-encrusted ‘Colony’, 2009 developed from her 2009 residency in the Galapagos Islands. Fascinated by barnacles as creatures that dwell – both literally and figuratively – in the spaces between sea and land, rock and animal, and liquid and solid, the artist also discovered, within their capacity to self-generate and form colonies, a metaphor for the rapid social, urban, and ecological developments occurring on Galapagos.
Kovats’ ‘Tilted’, 2002 exposes the artist’s keen interest in the rugged drama of coastal landscapes. Contained within the exposed rock cliff faces, are turbulent geological forces, which cut a stark line between light and dark, interior and exterior. By embedding the cliff within the architecture of a modernist plinth, Kovats uses an element of the landscape to attack the solidity of the white cube, subjecting it to the forces by which it was created. This ‘tilted’ cliff, as a boundary between land and sea, alludes to Kovats’ interest in oceans, a topic that comes to preoccupy much of her later work.
In her series of ‘Schist’, 2001 sculptures, Kovats’ use of wax, a material that is both responsive and malleable, allows for works that ooze and sweat, stretching in ways that result in physical abnormalities. Exhibited at a height at which they can be closely studied, Kovats encourages the eye to follow the layers of wax as they ripple and undulate, as well as the flakes of glitter which intersperse the coloured folds. On viewing these metamorphic sculptures, one becomes aware of Kovats’ exploration of both the artificial and the organic. To make these works, Kovats used ‘Mountain’, 2001, the design of which she based on a machine invented around 1900. Kovats poured colours of molten wax into the machine, allowing it to cool and set into sedimentary layers. She subsequently placed lead shot on top of the strata to act like a gravitational force to contain the layers, so that when she turned the mechanism’s handle, the piston, moving forward with a force like a tectonic plate, compressed the wax into hulking folds and ripples.
‘Tilted’ was at 5 Howick Place from March to October 2015.
David Adamo at Moorgate
HS Projects presented a site-specific exhibition of sculptural works by David Adamo in the lobby of Finsbury Circus House, in partnership with Ibid Gallery, London.
This is the first exhibition at Finsbury Circus House in Moorgate, London, part of a biannual exhibition programme that is aimed to engage, stimulate, and create dialogue in a multi-tenanted and much frequented building in the city of London. Finsbury Circus House is open to the public and is located between a Catholic church, with a historical connection to the building, and a tree lined square.
This project consists of four unique cedar sculptures by David Adamo. Vertical wood sculptures standing like columns, with square bases and capitals, and vessel-like works, carved from red cedar beams (historically used in the making of totem poles) with an adze, a physically engaging way of working, with the resulting sculptures retaining a sense of the body at work. The space’s simplicity and strong architectural lines gives it a monumental, almost mausoleum-like quality, while the combination of Adamo’s small scale bronze work with the wooden totemic sculptures makes for an interesting dialogue with the space, juxtaposing the natural and manmade elements, the roughly carved wood sculptures, and the unexpected small scale bronze sculpture of a clementine peel.
David Adamo was at Finsbury Circus House from February to June 2017.