Photo by Lucy Foster
Artists
Simone Douglas, Lindsay Farr, Irene Hanenburgh, Lotta Petronella, Kate Rohde, Benedict Sibley, Utako Shindo
In a world where technology, spectacle and excess can sometimes eclipse quieter contemplation of the interconnectedness of nature and culture, how do we reconcile our position as a virus in clothes that makes cities and internets of ineffable complexity? Has nature been assimilated into the artifice of culture? Or is culture simply of form of nature that humans produce? What role can art play in negotiating and mediating understandings and anxieties related to our place in the world? For this exhibition, art is implicated within the natures of phenomena and as an extension from that which we think of as nature itself. Welcome to the megacosm.
As a recurring sensibility in contemporary art, the inseparability of nature and culture might be considered across a broad range of very different materials and modalities. From beholding celestial infinitudes in the sky at night to serendipitous encounters with tiny creatures in urban environments, the aesthetics and poetics of this mutually entangled interconnectedness has long offered rich subject matter for artists. Notwithstanding the urgencies of our present moment, this exhibition seeks to resist didactic instrumentalisation and instead consider art and nature together as part of the labyrinthian continuum of reality.
Nature has returned with force as an artistic subject in recent years—largely in response to growing anxieties and precarities related to a changing world. Consequently, many artists are reassessing one of the oldest themes in art through new conceptual lenses and material means. In the twenty-first century, some forms of aesthetic speculation largely rejected by past generations have returned through new modes of material and poetic innovation. Although definitions and understandings of nature remain highly contested, the artists in this exhibition all variously explore what might be possible through mutually informing layers of material and imaginary complexity.
Echoing interconnectivities that intrinsically underscore the organic microcosm of human experience, some forms of art seem to implicitly resonate with patterns of difference and similarity across the universe. Presented through range of uncanny otherworldly verisimilitudes, this exhibition draws from a continuum that exists not only in cosmic nature, but also through registrations of human responses to the megacosm.