PLEASE CLICK HERE TO SEE MORE IMAGES
2nd – 19th October 2008Concrete & Glass Festival, Rove Galley, Hoxton Square, London, UK
5th December 2008 – 5th March 2009 International Kinetic Art Gallery A22, Budapest, Hungary
Kinetica Museum’s group show, Creatures Great and Small, showcased the work of ten UK and International Artists experimenting with evolution, hybridisation and the infiltration of technology. The artworks vivify inanimate materials with energetic vitality and are a comment on the relationship between our technologically enhanced society and the natural world.
CATALOGUE ESSAY
The man who sat on the ground in his tipi meditating on life and its meaning, accepting the kinship of all creatures and acknowledging unity with the universe of things was infusing into his being the true essence of civilisation. And when native man left off this form of development, his humanisation was retarded in growth.
Chief Luther Standing BearExcerpt from; Touch the Earth: A Self-Portrait of Indian ExistenceCompiled by T.C.McLuhan. Abacus 1973When we look at the natural around us, from the viewpoint of our western urbanised world, many of us, divorced as we are from daily contact with nature, are confused. We know we need to look and ask questions to understand the relationship of nature to ourselves today. We know there is a shift in our central knowledge of this relationship due to our detachment into busy technologically extended worlds of induced synthetic modification, computers, business and finance. Yet do we really know how to refine our view and create in ourselves a way of seeing that helps us to re-engage with what is 'natural' around us today?
The ecological and environmental movement, so strongly aware of the threat of our intense living methodologies to the planet, place the questions in front of us again and again, challenging us to take action against the depletion of the natural in our lives. We donate to causes, we recycle, we re-use and we take care not to waste. Yet, apart from the true activists amongst us, how much time do we get to give to honestly and deeply responding to nature and feeling its presence in our lives?
This exhibition places in front of us a series of artworks by artists who are questioning our relativity and understanding of nature and what is 'natural' in the technologically enhanced 21st century. They do so in a way that alters and shifts our perspectives.
The 'creatures' are experiments, kinetic objects with a life force. This exhibition calls us to reconsider, inside ourselves, at the point of viewing, how we emotionally connect with and experience the transferral of the energy of the work into ourselves and into our own spirit.
Sensitive, touching, poignant and tender, all these works affect us deeply. We are already aware of this strange emotional response in ourselves to life-like man made objects in our reaction to the development of robots and the known eeriness we feel as we move towards the man made human. It is a strange and quirky relativity this relationship between self and object and it requires an insightful and perceptive approach, one that is both observant and open and one that maybe needs to re-learn from those present and past who have spent time deep in nature, in the world of reviving the spirit.
Ghislaine Boddington, body>data>space, London, 2008
ARTISTS
ROVE EXHIBITION
Balint BolygoJim BondDaniel ChadwickRay LeeTim LewisReuben MargolinJack PavlikNik RamageRoger VilderTom Wilkinson
