New Agendas for An Old Paradigm

 

A series of installation works staged and photographed amidst ongoing musings on subjects around these objects.
 

A set of found objects is approached from an energetic perspective, addressed and transformed from their original function to reveal another narrative, imbued with new meanings far from its intended use. The re-workings of these abandoned objects celebrate the qualities of the common thing and invite us to pay fresh attention to the world they come from. 

 

For this work titled DEATH PROOF, a group of 1930s automobile headlamps, apprehended part way through the process of decay and re-presented, offers insights to the various pursuits of humankind’s activities - in a historical, present and future context. The re-appropriated forms become the focus of a study of the subtle and ephemeral traces of an age that defines the one we currently live in - the anthropocene, a geological age that marks the extent of human activities on the earth’s ecosystems. 

 

At times with an economy, wit and light touch, this group of objects invites us to be alert, to participate, to converse. It is an amazement beyond the nostalgic that draws us to these characters each with their untold stories, along the historical timeline and within the larger cosmological order. We become involved in our own fascination. By animating them through various arrangements, we discover the charged space of the ritualistic, and somewhere within there a platform to prod our dispositions and enact our preoccupations - of the post-industrial and our interconnectedness to each other, nature and the ephemeral forces of the unseen. 

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Weird Country 2014

 

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New Agendas for An Old Paradigm curated and photographed by Andrei Jewell except

Gathering, Third Orbit, The Lightness of Being curated and photographed by Jasmine Chen