Terminator

About

Terminator brings together a group of 14 contemporary London based artists whose practice examines the inherent legacies brought by new materials and strategies in art production.

'Desire is irrelevant. I am a machine'
(Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, 2003)

As the organic skin of oil on canvas is gradually supplanted by new materials; aluminium, vinyl, polymers and glass, notions like 'being true to nature' or 'looking to nature' for inspiration appear old fashioned quips, reminiscent of Tony Hancock's comical portrayal of a struggling artist in the film The Rebel (1961). Although the sublime and its associations with landscape still permeate contemporary painting, literature and cinema, the post-modern cybernetic artist of today is nature itself; a replicant nature and territory for human re-definition, where artists are no longer bound by the hierarchies of History Painting, Religion, Portraiture and Landscape Painting.

The 'Terminator' is a fictional cyborg first portrayed by Arnold Schwarzenegger in the 1984 movie by the same name, and it is this term Bolivar uses as a metaphor for this exhibition to describe the conditions surrounding contemporary art production. A cyborg is a cybernetic organism containing both artificial and natural systems, part-human part-machine. Like this cyborg, artists no longer seek to honour the natural world; instead their aim is to develop argumental strategies in a world transformed by technology, where individual cells flow in the circuits of liquid metal.

'It's a neural-net processor . It's superconducting at room temperature'
(Terminator 2: Judgement Day, 1991)

Participating artists in this exhibition are: Nicky Carvell, John Chilver, Nick Dawes, Angus Sanders-Dunnachie, Stewart Gough, James Hopkins, Andy Hsu, Hiroe Komai, Alec Kronacker, Jack Newling, Ian Monroe, Pamela Richardson & Kevin Smith, Julie Verhoeven