Exhibition

SEBASTIAN JEFFORD | RECORDS OF GARDEN KEEPING

5 Apr 2013 – 20 Apr 2013

Event times

12-5pm, Thursday - Saturday

Cost of entry

Free Admission

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works | projects

Bristol, United Kingdom

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Sebastian Jefford's exhibition is the fourth instalment in the gallery's Regional Interference exhibition cycle, profiling the most exciting emerging artists working in the South West of England.

About

For Records of Garden Keeping, Jefford's mixes references to ancient advice on the creation of Japanese Zen gardens with visual devices from the creation of catalogue images to create a meditation on our desire relationships with objects and the dance of anticipation and disappointment that is woven around this by the all pervading presence of digital imagery. Much like the promotion of the DIY and consumer products that Jefford's works ape, the artist's new work is accompanied by a series of promotional images that attempt to demonstrate not only its function but also its desirability. These images are encountered as an animated gif on the gallery website and the artists' own website for the duration of the exhibition. Displayed against fades of digital colour Jefford's peculiar objects are displayed in an expectation of function — a model moves a small abstract shape on a large, mobile display trolley; a set of bright orange batons spill out of a dark blue nylon bag. The objects suggest a space somewhere between play equipment, sport and DIY — a world of tactility and bodily involvement is evoked but kept at a sterile remove. In the gallery the visitor again encounters these images on a large commercial display monitor deliberately counterpointed against the actual objects. The objects are scattered across one half of the gallery as if left after use in an unknown scenario. The viewer is unsure of whether they should regard this scenario from outside, like the Zen gardens inferred in the exhibitions title, as a space of contemplation, or enter it and interact, as the objects suggest they will only truly reveal their meaning through use. Records of Garden Keeping explicitly exists between two, perhaps equally fictionalised, spaces — the accentuated anticipation of commercialised digital space and deliberately orchestrated disappointment of the physical potential of Jefford's objects that reveal themselves to be almost props for their promotional images rather than primary objects in their own right. In Jefford's work activity is fictionalised, desire is digitised, physicality plasticised until the seduction of the shell is the whole of the world. The work is part broken love-song to the primacy of the physical in an electronic culture, part illicit affair with the exquisite promiscuity of its betrayal in the democracy of digitisation.

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