Rules of the Game - Hybrids
Penultimate exhibition in the Rules of the Game series
May 8th to May 12th 2007
The modern world is made up of processes which order, delineate and assign subjectivities to space. It is these rules, the making of purified spaces and regulatory systems, which the artists in Hybrid aim to subvert. The result is an amalgamation of some rather unlikely couplings and strange conflations, which defy customary regimes of classification.
Hybrid features works such as Laura Taylor’s dystopian chimera, a life-size hybrid of a giraffe and zebra, which explores the propensity of modern medical science to create transgenic creatures. Garishly pink, with a computer keyboard on its back, Taylor creates her own cyborg, where nature is ever at the mercy of man. Amy Fish explores the subordination and externalisation of marginalised others in her piece Happy Holidays. The artist encourages the audience to interact with a 30cm tall animotronic toy dressed in the attire of a Guantanamo Bay prisoner. By controlling the toy, the audience is asked to consider the political injustices of our volatile world, in particular the fantastical manner in which they are reported by the media.
In Ashley Gallant’s piece the role of the audience is elevated to that of the curator, thereby subverting the delineation of power and identity. Entering the gallery space the audience is faced with a series of common board games which, when played, create a number. This number controls the volumes, the track and speed of the main artwork which is exhibited upon the ceiling of the gallery and viewed from bedding laid upon the floor. The artist highlights the concreteness of work in a gallery space and its relation to an anticipated, regulated viewing situation.
Naomi Terry considers the more mundane spaces of our home environment. By petrifying and mummifying usually functional objects, she encourages us to consider the poetic forms of our household machines. Through the neutral colour of the muslin the objects become ghostly, ambiguous and subvert their usual spatial categorisation. Out of place and out of context is also the concern of Jenna Finch’s audio piece, a sound-track comprised of an eerie translation of several of the artist’s favourite texts. As incoherent sounds, played at a staccato pace, replace the vocabulary of the texts, the audience is left bemused with no information as to the source of these eccentric noises. Thus, the author’s original intentions of the text are refuted as they take on new meanings and understandings.
Hybrid promises to be a vibrant and irreverent investigation of the rules which make up our ordered world. Hybrid has created an-Other way, a dialectic between the worldly and the otherworldly, forming a new environment by toying with the familiar. The viewer should expect to feel uncomfortable and unnerved, yet wonderfully compelled by these playful, imaginative and inventive pieces.