Slow Life

About

SLOW LIFE is a new exhibition of work curated by YUU TAKEHISA, organised by the John Hansard Gallery, in association with Limehouse Arts Foundation and taking place at the gallery at APT, Deptford. SLOW LIFE unites seven international artists whose works explore the parameters of today's hi-tech lifestyle. A combination of multidisciplinary works, several of which are newly commissioned for this project, illustrate the influences that technology has had on traditional values and the speed of contemporary life.
Responding to our excessive dependence on mass-produced goods, Wilfrid Almendra (an artist based in France) exhibits two meticulously handcrafted hardware tools as an antithesis to a dominant market-driven society. South African-born, London-based Dale Berning, has created an interactive sound piece that reflects upon exhaustive modern consumerism. Played on dubplates (a brittle alternative to vinyl that degrades through use), the work eventually deteriorates. With the analogue medium, Berning explores transience and decline intrinsic to life. Illustrative of cyberspace 'reality', Canadian artist Mark Karasick uses encaustic, an ancient wax-painting technique, to manipulate digital images (taken from an Internet forum where members showcase their portraits during the point of orgasm). He points out different moral codes and behaviours adopted respectively in 'real' and 'virtual' life. Tokyo-based Ryota Kuwakubo explores the effects of communication by hi-tech electrical equipment on human beings. By developing a device that extracts only consonant sounds from radio broadcast, Kuwakubo creates a chilling hypothesis of us unable to convey information due to loss of human intelligence: language. Tomoyasu Murata, a long-term resident of Tokyo's old town, explores the survival of values despite changes in urban society. Through highly lyrical stories, using hand-made puppets and props, Murata examines human sensitivity in every day life. By revisiting his childhood pastime of tinfoil rockets, Beltran Obregon (Columbian-born) highlights the proliferating ambition to conquer space through technology. By photographing the comical, calamitous and triumphant launch of these flimsy spacecraft, Obregon eloquently demonstrates pitfalls behind adventures. New York based Wolfgang Staehle, recognised as one of the pioneers of internet art, presents a projected landscape made from 10,000 digital images of the Hudson Valley, taken at regular intervals. Revisiting the subject of 19th century Hudson River painters, infinitesimal changes occur over hours of footage, at odds with the speed and urgency of life today.