Site Exploration Exhibition at Phoenix
Fri, 14 Feb 2014
The new exhibition at in the Cube Gallery at Phoenix is an interesting one. It contains work by a number of artists and deals with the subjects of environment, place and time.
The first piece you notice when you enter the gallery is the Subterranean soundscape produced by Semiconductor. This takes seismic data from earthquakes, volcanos and glaciers and makes it audible. It instantly places you in a primal world of grinding rocks and cracking ice.
Next, Benedikt Gross and Bertrand Clerc present Metrography - an apparently distorted map of London based on the underground map. Reminding us that all maps are actually distortions of some sort (Gregory Bateson commented extensively on the relationship between the map and territory, as did and Alfred Korzybski).
Perhaps my favourite piece in the exhibition is the long-running Mesocosm animation by Marina Zurkow of a seated figure (in the style of one of Lucian Freud's paintings of Leigh Bowery) in a Nothumberland landscape. Each day in the landscape is represented by 24 minutes in the gallery. The entire animation lasts for 146 hours, but has a generative element so that no two cycles are the same.
Locally-based artist Eric Rosoman's piece GPS Ducks is an interesting response to the story of the accidental release of nearly 29,000 rubber ducks from a container ship in 1992. This became a really important event in the study of ocean currents since ducks have now turned up all over the world. Eric has released a more modest number of ducks in to the local river system, but this time equipped with solar powered GPS trackers so that we can watch their journeys.
Finally, Charles Danby and Rob Smith's work The Quarry explores the site of the photographer/landscape artist Robert Smithson's artwork Chalk Mirror Displacement. It presents material from the quarry used to create the work as well as a collection of triangulated photographs. I actually need to go back and have another look at this piece since I didn't realise that there were QR codes with the photographs! Scanning these apparently plays video works.
The exhibition is one that deserves time being spent at it and is very rewarding if you allow yourself to take it all in. If runs at Phoenix until 28th February 2014.
See my pictures from the exhibition here.
