The Rebellious Script

About

NOW EXTENDED

Until Saturday 7 October

A-Side B-Side Gallery present a collaborative show by Geoff Titley and Amanda Lwin, created for Art Licks Weekend.

Amanda Lwin’s metal artefacts are based on 20th and 21st century skyscrapers that were constructed at the same time as a major financial crisis - a surprisingly frequent coincidence, known as The Skyscraper Index.

The perforated metal alludes to electronic hardware (server cabinets, cable trunking), but also a heritage of esotericism and mystic religion (Aztec breastplates, French tarot cards, Jain cosmologies) – creating objects that are familiar yet strange, everyday yet extra-terrestrial.

Skyscrapers, despite their hyper-rational appearance, also manifest absurd, irrational and egotistical impulses. The gleaming metal objects created by the artist are idols that frame contemporary economic ideologies as a mystery religion.

Geoff Titley, in turn, visits the natural landscape and considers how a technological view might interpret it.

In the series, The Distributed Presence of the Natural World, he re-configures the collected digital images through a process of revealing, concealing and reduction to component colours that results in images that could be considered to be aligned with such a view.

This technological view is part of a shared understanding and turning his lens on Amanda Lwin’s sculptures he looks at the recursive nature of this understanding, presenting the resulting work, within context, on the familiar face of a backlit Screen.

While the history of human life is an extended narrative of problem solving, the heady mix of late capitalism and advanced digital proves an irresistible force in expanding our ‘systems’ and building further and ever greater monuments.

The show’s title, The Rebellious Script, is a term borrowed from Yuval Noah Harari’s 2011 book Sapiens describing the ‘partial script’ of maths and accountancy. Harari explains that while this incomplete script is unable to describe the full gamut of human interaction, it has nevertheless come to dominate our worldview.