The Age Of Sagittarius

About

Sam Creasey + Damon James Owen 

‘Amser’ – Old Welsh: ‘Time, Moment, What about the stars?’

This presentation aims to be a lesson of now and a tool for teaching. In an era where myths are seldom told let alone believed, the role of the Centaur and the celestial poignancy within the phrase Amser is what the artists in this presentation seek to explore. Before clocks, sun dials guided people through the day. Teleologically, without the sundial’s ergonomics developed gradually by civilisation, the star would cease to have been able to keep us in rhythm and temporal harmony. A sundial could not have been made without teaching.

Honoured as a constellation by scientists and an architype for self-criticism, the night sky is also home to a great teacher, the centaur Chiron. Unlike the savage, primitive centaurs born of Ixion’s predatory relation with Nephele, Chiron was an exemplary immortal born of Titan, and subsequently under the oversight of Apollo, became a mentor for many mythical heroes such as Achilles, Asclepius and Peleus. Chiron’s journey to his eventual urn in the sky was marked by sacrifice, labour and pain. Caught in a crossfire, an arrow fired by Heracles laced with the poisoned venom of the Hyrda struck the centaur, condemning its hybrid body to eternal agony but not death. Distraught and guilty, Heracles pleaded with Zeus to take pity on the centaur and bring him peace in the sky.

The myth of Chiron inspires the kind of wisdom that only life experience and conscious understanding of our inner wounds can reveal. Born two days apart in December, the art practises of Damon Owen and Sam Creasey both look inward at themselves and outward at the world around them. The governing systems of capital, labour and the gig economy collide with their yearning for creative output and independent thought. Featuring shifting visions of cities, manufacturing, urban sociology and infrastructure, their work documents an increasingly homogenised and privatised society which blocks the ability to consume and regurgitate valuable lessons.