Uncertain Matter

About

Matérias Incertas (Uncertain Matter) brings together three international, interdisciplinary artists whose works explore in different ways the tangibility of material in the digital age. Featuring video, sculpture, glass, print, and installation, their works filter a concern with formal aesthetics and abstraction through an expanded material palette. Whilst each artist makes works that are strongly visual, their processes of production are highly mediated and complex. They reflect both an awareness of how the experience of digital worlds has altered our relationship with matter, and a desire to innovate relative to modernist art history.

As such, a mood of detachment and distance prevails: the hand of the artist is not entirely missing, but it is being controlled by a mind that has become analytical. Over the past three decades, computers have become more central in daily life, to the extent that they are now increasingly becoming extensions of our bodies. The outcomes of science shape every aspect of human life, yet its processes are now so advanced and specialised that it is virtually impossible for the average human to understand how their world is constructed.

In attempting to respond to this state of affairs, many contemporary artists have engaged in quasi-reactionary, performative obsessions with material for its own sake. Many others have fully embraced technology, thereby losing their connection to matter and getting lost in the groundless and infinite space of the digital. The artists in this exhibition attempt to find a path through this situation without falling into either of these traps. Working broadly within a tradition of abstraction (without excluding the representational possibilities of cameras), their works aim to construct new spaces that are both material and virtual. Existing in the ambiguous borderland between flatness and pictorial depth, these works invite the viewer to explore the material possibilities of art in the age of the silicon microchip.