WORLDS ON A WIRE

David Auborn, Alice Browne, Freya Guest, Rae Hicks, Lee Johnson, Scott McCracken, Neal Tait, Katie Trick
Curated by Scott McCracken

9th - 24th July 2022

The title of the exhibition is a variation of Rainer Werner Fassbender’s 1973 television serial World on a Wire (Welt am Draht), itself an adaptation of Daniel F. Galouye’s novel Simulacron-3.  A world on a wire is a precarious situation.  The image of this mass entity hanging there, swinging and spinning, suspended only by a single wire acts as a metaphor for picture-making.

Picture-making, such as painting or drawing, relies on a sort of accepted artificiality.  What we see is not really what we see – we are looking at a construction.  But it is not simply about world-building, it is also about a world-unbuilding.  A taking apart and a reassembling where parts don’t fit so comfortably together, where the absurd and the quotidian, the diurnal and the nocturnal, the telescopic and the microscopic, can sit together in a kind of unifying tension.  An unworlding.  An unwordling and an unworldliness.  Paintings have an inherent supernaturality as well their own inherent naturality.  A process of transformation happens on the surface of the work.  It never fully becomes the thing it claims or attempts to picture.  Nor does it simply remain as material and matter.  Something else is happening, there is a continual becoming. 

Ragle Gumm, the protagonist in Philip K Dick’s novel Time Out Of Joint, experiences a moment where he misremembers the light cord in his bathroom:

“Why did I remember a light cord? he asked himself.  A specific cord, hanging a specific distance down, at a specific place. I wasn’t groping around randomly.  As I would in a strange bathroom.  I was hunting for a light cord I had pulled many times.”

The light cord described above, perhaps not dissimilar to the light cord hanging in the gallery, serves as a reminder of the difference between illumination and darkness, between light and shadow.  It is its own wire on which the adjacent worlds presented in the gallery can be lit up, revealed, or plunged into darkness.