Indus 2
24 May - 20 Jul 2019
INDUS 2
24 May - 20 July 2019
The gallery is pleased to present fve artists whose work highlights the current concerns generated by the overproduction of industrial objects. Can we resist the omnipresence of everyday mass production?
This concern is not new. In 1979, Jimmy Carter, then president of the United States, doubted the turn that the economic model his country was taking: “Human identity is no longer defned by what one does, but by what one owns. But we’ve discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We’ve learned that piling up material goods cannot fll the emptiness of lives which have no confdence or purpose.”
A few decades later, the dreaded specter of a consumer-based society of production has become reality. Intelligence is no longer paired with consciousness, we are all concerned about our buying power.
Already in the 50’s, Raymond Aron wondered about the relationship between consumption and progress. He emphasized the technical evolutions necessary for the development of growth and therefore for the endless evolution of the industrial apparatus. But almost a century after this promise of progress, its corollary brings out a disproportionate amount of products that act negatively on our general well-being. It’s not just about ecology. The number of dissatisfed persons is inversely proportional to the number of those who accumulate property. Indirectly, growth leads to profound social and political changes that can be seen in the rise of extremes in most of the societies that emerged from the industrial revolution. In order to get away from it, we start dreaming of the GNH* of Boutan or of a possible GNW* in the West.
Gradually, industry has taken control of practices, knowledge and human relationships resulting from long processes of adaptation. Yet humanity did not wait for the nineteenth century to mass-produce. From hunter-gatherers to the Indus Valley, social organization has always allowed societies to live in the intelligence of a sharing economy. Around the Indus, to which the title of the exhibition refers, the few excavations carried out found no trace of plutocracy or of a pyramidal power. Certainly our knowledge of the subject remains rather sketchy, but this civilization might be the example of a society that was able to maintain an egalitarian way of life for more than a millennium.
For a more conscious industry, there are current solutions surprisingly close to the concepts sketched by Saint Simon in the nineteenth century. His network philosophy is now supplanted by industrial symbiosis. “Symbiosis”, a term referring to a natural phenomenon that means both togetherness and life.
This is a value found in the practice of Tania Pérez Córdova. Her work aims to direct our attention beyond the gallery’s walls to connect to the daily lives of others and objects. Some of the objects in the exhibition have undergone a radical transformation. They were not borrowed from someone, like the guitar string on the wall sculpture, but bought on a market and melted to be reconstituted in their original form. This rebirth
For Matthew Angelo Harrison’s ceramic sculptures, made using a 3D printer of his own making, the deformation is intentional: it introduces an anomaly in the computer program, which causes a slight change with each printing of African masks. The copying of the copy deteriorates as it is reproduced. He examines both the division between African and Afro-American culture and the autophagy of the capitalist system.
The lichen is a form of symbiosis that strangely resembles Kate Newby’s ceramic sculptures. In the same way that an alga can grow with a mushroom, it is the assembly of two different bodies: bottle shards collected in the street and earth, which constitutes the work to come. To achieve this, the oven fame fuses the inert organisms and reduces them to scales, small puddles as hazardous as magnifcent. The artist likes to work in situ because she wants to interact with her environment, as shown by the installation of a glass bag echoing the architecture of the gallery’s windows.
Dewar & Gicquel, known for a sculptural practice on the border of craftsmanship and rurality, often play with recognizable shapes of art history. Their humor and virtuosity mask an element that is rarely qualifed: time. Yet in our unbridled society, in the hour of immediate information, it is a real pleasure to imagine the hours spent in the making of their works. Far from the Amazonian refex of immediate consumption, their practice requires unlimited patience. The wooden reliefs presented in the exhibition were sanded by hand or smashed with gouge. Masculine backs whose softness is matched only by the power of a musculature that refects the effort of accomplished work.
Where Harrison consciously dissolves the identity of one sculpture, the mask and its double remains the favorite subject of Caroline Achaintre’s hand tufted works. The mask is a form that allows reality and fantasy to simultaneously cohabit. The artist’s work hence become reminders to all different cultures of the world; whether primitive, modern, ancient or future, they are all that the spectator can imagine. Nothing is defned by the artist since everything is interconnected in a new form of network or symbiosis, but this time cultural.
*GNH: Gross National Happiness
** GNW: Gross National Well-being
24 May - 20 July 2019
The gallery is pleased to present fve artists whose work highlights the current concerns generated by the overproduction of industrial objects. Can we resist the omnipresence of everyday mass production?
This concern is not new. In 1979, Jimmy Carter, then president of the United States, doubted the turn that the economic model his country was taking: “Human identity is no longer defned by what one does, but by what one owns. But we’ve discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We’ve learned that piling up material goods cannot fll the emptiness of lives which have no confdence or purpose.”
A few decades later, the dreaded specter of a consumer-based society of production has become reality. Intelligence is no longer paired with consciousness, we are all concerned about our buying power.
Already in the 50’s, Raymond Aron wondered about the relationship between consumption and progress. He emphasized the technical evolutions necessary for the development of growth and therefore for the endless evolution of the industrial apparatus. But almost a century after this promise of progress, its corollary brings out a disproportionate amount of products that act negatively on our general well-being. It’s not just about ecology. The number of dissatisfed persons is inversely proportional to the number of those who accumulate property. Indirectly, growth leads to profound social and political changes that can be seen in the rise of extremes in most of the societies that emerged from the industrial revolution. In order to get away from it, we start dreaming of the GNH* of Boutan or of a possible GNW* in the West.
Gradually, industry has taken control of practices, knowledge and human relationships resulting from long processes of adaptation. Yet humanity did not wait for the nineteenth century to mass-produce. From hunter-gatherers to the Indus Valley, social organization has always allowed societies to live in the intelligence of a sharing economy. Around the Indus, to which the title of the exhibition refers, the few excavations carried out found no trace of plutocracy or of a pyramidal power. Certainly our knowledge of the subject remains rather sketchy, but this civilization might be the example of a society that was able to maintain an egalitarian way of life for more than a millennium.
For a more conscious industry, there are current solutions surprisingly close to the concepts sketched by Saint Simon in the nineteenth century. His network philosophy is now supplanted by industrial symbiosis. “Symbiosis”, a term referring to a natural phenomenon that means both togetherness and life.
This is a value found in the practice of Tania Pérez Córdova. Her work aims to direct our attention beyond the gallery’s walls to connect to the daily lives of others and objects. Some of the objects in the exhibition have undergone a radical transformation. They were not borrowed from someone, like the guitar string on the wall sculpture, but bought on a market and melted to be reconstituted in their original form. This rebirth
For Matthew Angelo Harrison’s ceramic sculptures, made using a 3D printer of his own making, the deformation is intentional: it introduces an anomaly in the computer program, which causes a slight change with each printing of African masks. The copying of the copy deteriorates as it is reproduced. He examines both the division between African and Afro-American culture and the autophagy of the capitalist system.
The lichen is a form of symbiosis that strangely resembles Kate Newby’s ceramic sculptures. In the same way that an alga can grow with a mushroom, it is the assembly of two different bodies: bottle shards collected in the street and earth, which constitutes the work to come. To achieve this, the oven fame fuses the inert organisms and reduces them to scales, small puddles as hazardous as magnifcent. The artist likes to work in situ because she wants to interact with her environment, as shown by the installation of a glass bag echoing the architecture of the gallery’s windows.
Dewar & Gicquel, known for a sculptural practice on the border of craftsmanship and rurality, often play with recognizable shapes of art history. Their humor and virtuosity mask an element that is rarely qualifed: time. Yet in our unbridled society, in the hour of immediate information, it is a real pleasure to imagine the hours spent in the making of their works. Far from the Amazonian refex of immediate consumption, their practice requires unlimited patience. The wooden reliefs presented in the exhibition were sanded by hand or smashed with gouge. Masculine backs whose softness is matched only by the power of a musculature that refects the effort of accomplished work.
Where Harrison consciously dissolves the identity of one sculpture, the mask and its double remains the favorite subject of Caroline Achaintre’s hand tufted works. The mask is a form that allows reality and fantasy to simultaneously cohabit. The artist’s work hence become reminders to all different cultures of the world; whether primitive, modern, ancient or future, they are all that the spectator can imagine. Nothing is defned by the artist since everything is interconnected in a new form of network or symbiosis, but this time cultural.
*GNH: Gross National Happiness
** GNW: Gross National Well-being