TRACE

Group exhibition

March 2012

Artists:

Yusuke Fukuoka
Danielle Gottesman
Catalina Barroso Luque
Panachai Chaijirarat
Pam Liu
Courtney Batson
Jian Wei Lim
Jenni Crain
Charlotte Kaye
Peter Florczyk
Heidi Rada

In an age where technology has changed our understanding of the spaces we inhabit and the relationships we maintain with these and what is contained within them, the presence of the human gesture becomes no more than a trace.
The artists in this exhibition explore through different media, how forms in contemporary culture become ‘other’, creating a plethora of realities that overlap, and are impossible to distinguish from the ‘real’.
Space becomes a product of representation, which can be used as a social tool, organizing and imposing a schema upon which we orientate ourselves within a multitude of changing landscapes. ‘Ideology’ is then conceived in terms of a space of representation that the subject inhabits, a limitless space, which the subject negotiates his/her way through. Everyday spaces and the activities we engage in end up creating narratives to an extent predetermined by the contemporary environment itself. Consequently, the authenticity of our experiences, of both the artwork and life beyond the gallery, is put into question.
Some works engage in an investigation of the self as a product of habitual patterns, where experience, memory and social structures interweave. Others explore the arising contradictions between machine memory, human memory, collective memory, and the relics – both physical and symbolic – left behind from a different era.  Overall all works explore the shifting boundaries between being an enclosure that structures our engagement with the world, and being a threshold into other realities.

Text by Catalina Barroso Luque