islands: coleman project space

‘islands’ brings together the works of artist and curator richard ducker and collaborators ruth gibson and bruno martelli.

the title, with its implications of being at once static and afloat, provides a suitably myth-laden motif for the notion of technological shift that is central to each enquiry. analogue and digital sensibilities are brought together in the creation of spectacle-savvy, visually seductive environments for coleman projects’ gallery and shed spaces.

in situ, ducker’s vel­vety mod­er­nesque objects evoke both lit­er­ary and filmic inves­ti­ga­tions into sci­ence fic­tion, and the retro aes­thet­ics asso­ci­at­ed with envi­sion­ing the future. gibson/martelli’s mul­ti-media man­i­fes­ta­tions of epic polar jour­neys, mean­while, are rich with ref­er­ences to the hero­ic exploits of icon­ic explor­ers and art his­tor­i­cal rep­re­sen­ta­tions of the nat­ur­al world.

duck­er’s firm­ly ana­logue, entire­ly sta­t­ic and unashamed­ly syn­thet­ic pre­sen­ta­tion of ‘dark mat­ter flow­ers’ (2014) brings to mind com­put­er-based means of recre­at­ing action: from the motion pic­ture green­screen to the eerie avatar land­scapes of gam­ing zones. his high­ly desir­able objects appear to have been made with mul­ti­ple dimen­sions in mind, whether the flat sur­face-world of the motif, that of vir­tu­al post-pro­duc­tion or the phys­i­cal­ly nego­tiable object realm.

 gibson/martelli, on the oth­er hand, work with the tech­nolo­gies and for­mal devices of video gam­ing to explore ideas of the sub­lime. their appli­ca­tion of the gam­ing ver­nac­u­lar speaks of our con­tem­po­rary pre­oc­cu­pa­tion with screen-based and inter­ac­tive tech­nolo­gies in the search for mean­ing and medi­at­ed expe­ri­ence. here they present two new works based on a res­i­den­cy in the arc­tic cir­cle: ‘white island (2014) and per­fect cir­cle (2013), which sit in the divide between the real and the imag­ined. these beau­ti­ful, yet wry­ly inter­ac­tive polar vis­tas bring to light the chang­ing ways and means of expe­ri­enc­ing a place.