RAIN

About

curated by Nicolas Deshayes RAIN is an exhibition curated by Nicolas Deshayes that addresses the material slippage between public and intimate experiences of collective space. Exploring the production of display and the sensuality of its potential erosion, many of the pieces ambiguously break down the materiality of presentation structures associated with the designed environment. For this exhibition, Deshayes chooses to disperse the works in the exhibition space, proposing a stylized hang symbolic of the notion of precipitation. A precipitation that can be interpreted metaphorically as scrutinising the excess of technological diffusion - of imagery and surface - in the grander scheme of consumer culture. The works brought together are made primarily from what Deshayes calls ‘public' materials - ephemera of the everyday - such as glass, plastic and aluminium. The wetness and sheen of these materials become desire-inducing signifiers for a type of processed industrial ‘nowness' that links to all of the works on show. RAIN becomes an environment that is made up of repeated sequences of ubiquitous imagery and familiar surfaces played out in an ambiguous game of cause and effect; from hard edge materiality, to pools of water and their muddy fusion. The flatness of low floor works by Magali Reus and Yonatan Vinitsky are subjected to the pull of gravity catalysed by the weight of Mathew Smith's ribbed black dustbins looming from above. In a similar pull of scale, Anders Clausen's enlarged detailing of the familiar blue scroll from Apple Mac's seductive interface perverts and reflects the wetness and waterproof properties of PVC and plastics that are deployed physically in the rest of the show. There is an abstraction where Clausen's Bar Master 17, 2010 and Reus' Short Supplies, 2010 could be interpreted as structural technological approximations of water drops, transforming them into ciphers of desire-based economies. Structure and image fuse as technology wrestles with a human dimension. The body appears absent in the exhibition, yet human dimensions are implied in George Henry Longly's shelter-like glass sculpture or Tom Godfrey's story board-like lithograph: highlighting the necessary tension between a potential protagonist and this slippery environment.