Exhibition

The Habitat of Time Curated by Julie Louise Bacon

20 Feb 2020 – 14 Mar 2020

Regular hours

Monday
Closed
Tuesday
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Wednesday
Closed
Thursday
12:00 – 18:00
Friday
12:00 – 18:00
Saturday
12:00 – 18:00
Sunday
Closed

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Arts Catalyst

London, United Kingdom

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A new group exhibition exploring the role of time as a medium in shaping human and more-than-human worlds.

About

Arts Catalyst presents a new group exhibition curated by Julie Louise Bacon in the context of her current residency as associate curator and The Habitat of Time international research project. 

CURATOR'S STATEMENT

The project focuses on the way that time as a medium shapes our perception of life, the structure of societies, and the vastness of the physical world. The artworks featured in the exhibition propose a rescaling of human time and expose its deep interrelations with the diversity of the more-than-human realm, moving through the geological, technological, biological and cosmic.

Every era experiences and understands time differently. In the 21st century, the instability of globalisation, the speed of digital technologies, and the transformation of knowledge are generating rapid shifts in time. These shifts unfold at individual, collective and planetary scales. In a climate of acceleration, compressed and volatile time, the artists show up temporal relations in new ways, through their work with the forms and rhythms of: analogue and digital media; seeds, insects and matter; graphite, ochre and charcoal; satellites, strata and atmospheres.

Thomson & Craighead’s work Horizon, acts as a visual and conceptual index of the modern, global regime of clock time. In the premiere of a newly-formatted 4K iteration of the work, the London-based artist duo collate imagery captured from webcams positioned in each of the world’s 24 time zones, which are accessed remotely via the Internet. The work explores the potential of the Internet to convey the experience of duration and exposes the slippage between the conditions of network, planetary and local time. 

The exhibition features works by five Australian artists all of which are shown in the UK for the first time. Robert Andrew is a descendant of the Yawuru people; his mother’s country encompasses Rubibi (Broome) and its surrounds in the Kimberley Region of Western Australia. In a video work produced for the exhibition, Andrew reconfigures traces of an intricate drawing machine that he installed at Metro Arts, Brisbane for the exhibition Disruptive (Ill) logic (2017). The machine was driven by a Cartesian coordinate system that accepted texts from the Yawuru language as a stimulus to manoeuvre organic objects – including charred wood, shell, rock and ochre – across the gallery’s surfaces. The video iteration of the work reinvokes the erasure of indigenous culture and exposes the power of symbolic materials and technology to shape relationships with time.

Ark (2020) is a new single-channel video by James Geurts which focuses on the Flinders Ranges in Australia, formed some 650 million years ago, and the location of the world's oldest fossil evidence of multicellular life. Geurts exposed 35mm film footage, captured at sites around the  Ranges, to the climate, light and dust in the area. The film was then threaded through a Steenbeck editing machine manually, and the duration  of the feed varied, while the imagery was re-captured in digital format. The experimental process draws out the matter of time held within and between celluloid, biological and geological bodies.

In Trajectories II: Prebiotica (2019) Geurts presents the traces of a durational experiment with the oldest material known to exist on Earth, taken from a meteorite that landed in Australia in 1969. The work, developed at CSIRO Advanced Manufacturing through an ANAT Synapse residency, reflects on the threshold at which the chemical becomes biological, and life emerges. 

Lucy Bleach’s The Slow Seismogenic Zone: core sample (i) (2020) samples sound recordings of a phenomenon known as ‘slow earthquakes’, accessed during her residency at a research facility in Japan. The development of technologies that monitor extremely low frequencies enabled scientists to detect the presence of a form of seismic activity that has the potential to either diffuse or trigger more rapid and destructive earthquake events. The installation of the work in the gallery window draws the site and the public into the vibrational field of techno-geological time.

seed in Space/sound in time (2017) by Josh Wodak sonifies the temperature range experienced by three seeds of the critically-endangered, prehistoric Australian Wollemi Pine during the year-long NASA Seeds in Space experiment, in 2008. The left channel maps the temperature experienced by a Wollemi control sample seed in Mount Annan seedbank. The right channel maps the temperature of an experimental seed on the International Space Station. In the centre channel is the climate experienced by an uncollected seed still lying in Wollemi National Park. The sound samples are all of the Snowy Tree Cricket, which modifies its pitch and pulse rate according to changes in its ambient temperature.

In The Pinned Moth Cannot Fly, 2018, Eva Nolan uproots the hierarchy of the system of taxonomy developed in the 18th century by the botanist Carl Linnaeus. Nolan creates a speculative and biodiverse ecosystem by digitally fracturing, blending and stitching together high-resolution scans of her graphite drawings. The resulting animated forms depart from the standard, modern view of evolutionary time, and challenge the implication of colonial-originating taxonomies in our perception of the interrelationships between life forms.

CuratorsToggle

Julie Louise Bacon

Exhibiting artistsToggle

Lucy Bleach

Thomson & Craighead

James Geurts

Eva Nolan

Josh Wodak

Robert Andrew

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