this has travelled through the night to you
The Regency Town House / 13 Brunswick Square /Brighton & Hove
9th - 10th October 2021 / Open 11:00 – 18:00
Map
Bob Matthews
David Blandy
Emma Bang
Finlay Taylor
Ian Brown
Jasmine Padjak
Jill Vigus
Jo Love
Kate Scrivener
Meg Rahaim
Bringing into alignment these artists, just briefly, exposes their shared relationships to thinking about the surface of the planet where life exists.
It’s a layer about a kilometre thin and is recently being referred to as the critical zone. This term is still being defined, and itself does not refer to the entire planet but just the very, very small layer which enables life to exist.
This pop-up exhibit, or revealing of work by these artists, shares narratives and alternative ways of thinking and seeing our habitat.
David Blandy re-sites his 2019 film The World After, made during a commission with Focal Point Gallery, Southend-on-Sea and New Geographies. The film is narrated by male and female future beings in the 101st century, the world as we know it now has collapsed, gone, after a ‘cataclysm’. The narrators describe the emergence of newly evolved life forms this is set against moving images of the seasonal flora and fauna of Canvey Island, Essex, where the project was commissioned. Close up and detailed the familiar becomes spectacular and at times disconcerting.
Exposing something of recent natural histories, Ian Brown’s etchings, Corncrake, Burbot and Red Backed Shrike collage images from differing sources, two images of an iceberg are colour processed to reveal contrasting visual readings which jar against pictures of extinct English species. Re-purposing images form the recent past, like cigarette cards and post card imagery, the works collude to say, ‘things could be different’.
Continuing the test of notions concerning time and space, Kate Scrivener makes small painted works. These in part propose that interactions with landscapes or natural phenomena are being re-arranged by current understandings. Gentle surfaces indicate invisible or disappearing interactions, interactions of light, space, molecular activity and abstract recitals of the world. To be fathomed they need time, maybe quiet, a slow eye, something the Anthropocene finds nauseating.
Scrivener’s Bonsai Tree is a curio, something preserved, carefully sheltered in paint and painted texts, speaking of stories of extreme weather and tales of happenings from the landscape.
This Has Travelled Through The Night To You comes from the nocturnal side of the planet and touches down in Brighton, delivered like a desirous message after an onerous journey.
The exhibition is pleased to debut a new text by Meg Rahaim for the event.