Analogue or Digital? A Million Times, it’s not that black and white.
“I followed my instinct with this show’, says gallery owner, MacGarry. In this latest exhibition at the Kate MacGarry gallery in London’s Shoreditch, pieces are brought together and united almost by accident under a theme which explores the tension and cooperation between tradition and technology, nostalgia and the new. MacGarry created the show around two lynch-pin pieces: A Million Times 72, by Humans Since 1982 and Backdrop. Hall. by Goshka Macuga.
“I thought I’ll let all the threads come through before making sense of it all. But it’s amazingly serendipitous that this just goes together so well”, MacGarry says of the exhibition’s evolution.
Already well-known in the design world, Stockholm-based Swedish/German duo, Humans Since 1982, have backgrounds in design and engineering. But in this exhibition their peerless creations are brought to the less-familiar art audience.
Presented in the gallery’s entrance is one of their signature clocks and the inspiration for the name of the show. Comprised of 72 tiny clock hands, they rotate independently from each other in seemingly random patterns before synchronously arranging themselves at precise one minute intervals to reveal a single large ‘digital’ wall clock. The resulting effect is mesmerising.
Dominating the rear wall of the gallery space is Polish artist, Goshka Macuga’s vast tapestry, Backdrop. Hall. It is a multilayered work which has been shown at the Berlin biennale and was originally created as part of a stage set for a play based on a collaboration between the artist and the philosopher and curator, Dieter Roelstraete.
MacGarry concedes that its complexity of meaning is a potential distraction in the context of the show. “What I liked is simply the idea of the process; the photograph turned into a tapestry”, she says.
The factory that produced the tapestry, based in Flanders, has been in existence for hundreds of years but employs high technologies in its looms to converge centuries of tradition with the most contemporary techniques.
“We’re all craving some kind of analogue in the digital world we live in”, explains MacGarry, “so the texture of the tapestry and the texture of the clock I thought was really lovely.”
In each of the art works on display, repetition and optical illusion are evidently strong theses. Three pairs of Polaroids by Peter Liversidge are presented as diptychs, with the second image in each displayed as an attempted facsimile of the first. Liversidge’s method is to capture a scene and then force himself to wait for the image to fully realise in the Polaroid before attempting to replicate the same scene as closely as possible in a second photograph.
Yet there is a perverse and frustrating sense of inevitable failure about the approach. Liversidge’s scenes are precariously fleeting, relying mostly on shadow, shade and free-form objects like leaf litter. By capturing shadows minutes apart, which will invariably move, Liversidge is like a King Canute of light. He can’t hold back the turning of the globe.
Also attempting to harness and manipulate the light is Haroon Mirza. His installations examine the interaction and resistance of sound, light and electrical current and his exhibited sculpture, Solar Cell Circuit 11, makes use of these interactions in order to respond to sunlight passing over its surface.
Appositely for a black and white exhibition there is no artificial light in the gallery for this show. A glass ceiling floods the space with daylight until sunset, when its works are allowed to be subsumed by darkness.
This is an exhibition whose works fall along a spectrum of light and shade. A monochrome collection where each piece is neither analogue or digital, not one thing or the other. It is in the gradual spaces between the binary, that the meaning is illuminated.
Emily Bland
A MILLION TIMES - (Humans Since 1982, Peter Liversidge, Goshka Macuga, Haroon Mirza) runs until 16 July 2016 at Kate MacGarry Gallery, Shoreditch.
