New Exhibition Explores Networked Society At Blain/Southern

Blain/Southern

Blain/Southern present the exhibition ‘Refraction. The Image of Sense’, a group show curated by Peter J. Amdam. The exhibition brings together artists who in very different ways accentuate how art operates in an era of new media, in a world which is indiscernibly both human and non-human at the same time.

“The web stores, directs and administers our memories, dreams, affections, desires, longings, beliefs, afflictions, fears, perversions, morals, finances, political convictions and even bodily movement. It is a fluid container of the same arcane matter that art has attempted to both organise and dis-organise for centuries. One can now speculate about the post-human, a composite agency that still feels, senses and imagines the world around us, suggesting a deeply charged modulation on the way the aesthetic experience of art is conceptualised, sensed and imagined.” Stes the exhibition’s curator Peter Amdam.

The exhibition explores the ways and workings of a ‘networked society’ – which may alter how memory, expression, colour, materiality and so forth, are brokered, mediated and refracted through art. This no longer depends on cognition in a traditional sense, but runs and pulsates through a pre-cognitive and arcane network. The show attempts to grapple with the notion and idea of this post-human perception and imagination.

Uncannily anticipating many of the ideas addressed in this exhibition, Bill Viola’s work ‘Information’, 1973, explores the unknown edges of the then nascent video technology to the fullest and lets said technology live a life of its own. Not only does Viola’s ‘Information’ instantiate something of the post-human agency, it also precedes the way contemporary society absorbs and metabolises a technologically propelled flow of production, suggesting the archiving of image, sense and memory.

The new set of paintings by Ida Ekblad trace mesmerising colours, washes, airbrush techniques, puffy inks, graffiti and alien-like life forms. In these works digital memories meet a confident and explorative sensibility for painting itself.

Elias Hansen’s work involves artisan and rhizomatic glass assemblages. Hansen is a trained glass blower – a fact which accounts for the seductive, hands-on appeal of his installations. These are charged with an open-ended fascination and love for both the outcast and the outlaw – multi-dimensional worlds brimming with light, colour and intensity.

Lars Holdhus is also a skilled musician and a self professed ‘tech-head’. Accordingly his works reflect a strong sense of rhythm, seriality and melody, as well as a deep immersion in technology. He works with captivating images of both nature and science, adding multiple layers of surfaces and interfaces of his ‘personal’ signature.

Yngve Holen’s work suggests an obsession with contemporary life, travel and leisure, as well as cleanliness, surgery and control. His works – as this water cooler – often appear as dissected ready-made’s from the future.

Blain/Southern Refraction. The Image Of Sense 10 December 2014 to 31 January 2015

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