Exhibition

Instant Archives

20 Aug 2011 – 11 Sep 2011

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David Dale Gallery

Glasgow, United Kingdom

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Instant Archives | Emily Donnini, Travis Souza & Ralph Mackenzie Curated by Nicola Wright 20/08/2011 — 11/09/2011 Preview: Friday 19/08/2011 | 19:00 — 21:00 Friday — Sunday | 12:00 - 17:00 David Dale Gallery & Studios are pleased to present Instant Archives, an exhibition of new work by Emily Donnini, Travis Souza and Ralph Mackenzie, curated by Nicola Wright. Instant Archives marks the first exhibition of an annual curatorial opportunity offered by David Dale Gallery & Studios, which invites an emerging curator to propose and instigate an exhibition with the support of the gallery. The ‘instant archive': silos of un-arbitrated information created by the quickening pace and expansion of communications within a contemporary society; the detritus of action. Instant Archives proposes alternatives to hierarchical presentations of texts and images to interrogate failure within these systems, both created and inherent, and escape the given classifications of their subject matters. The archive becomes less a container than a model for distribution in a move beyond narrating information to (dis)organising it, creating distances and deferrals between a past and present, here and there. Emily Donnini explores the slippages that occur within categorical determinations to engender non-hierarchical understandings of information, ciphers, texts and forms. Working with repositories such as Internet search engines and vinyl records, works transpose and problematise distances, allowing fleeting, fugitive correlates to arise. For Instant Archives, Donnini will present new video work in addition to related sculptural and photographic works. Filmed predominately in Dawsholm Park, the video captures the seductive qualities of what first appears to be fields of luminescent foreign bodies, intercut with animation and stock footage. Drawing on Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged (1957), illusions to science fiction and couture fashion are strangely displaced against Rand's charter of absolute individualism combined with a demanding moral hierarchy. Ralph Mackenzie's practice marks the significance of production over resulting product. For Instant Archives, Mackenzie will present new work that extrapolates the cyclical manufacture, reconstitution, entropy and eventual erasure of information within a finite, analogue container. Consisting of two ‘stations' - recording and playback - sounds are collected from the surrounding space and replayed on a delay, only to be erased once the tape has looped and new information has been recorded. Through innumerable iterations and restatements, the work's edit follows an interior logic or system, which manifests itself as an engagement with the space of production as a form of both dissemination and redaction. Travis Souza's modes of engagement, from a self-directive school programme to a three-legged race for the unemployed, see him considering the art world's culture of work and leisure, and its ostensible function as a utopian model for production and labour. Works produced often have several lives, existing provisionally between meanings and context to renegotiate their given discourses. Souza's work for Instant Archives takes its title from William Morris's News From Nowhere, or, An Epoch of Rest, Being Some Chapters From a Utopian Romance (1890). A divergent kind of aspirational setting constitutes the works visuals; swimming pools in holiday brochures. For the duration of the preview evening, Souza will be at the actual location of one of the pools depicted.

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