Exhibition Press Release and Statement, m2 Gallery

12/11/2004
This statement accompanied the press release for the exhibition I FIND YOUR LACK OF FAITH DISTURBING in November 2004 at the m2 gallery at Quay2c, Peckham, London.
Words

I like words. Nice short ones, and incontrovertibly etiolated ones. Words like pompous and
portentous, but not words like irony. That one reminds me too much of my shirts in the
morning.
I especially like words I find elsewhere, because that means I don’t have to make them up.
Recently I’ve been taking quotes from sci-fi movies and putting them into paintings and
installations where they sometimes obscure, and are sometimes obscured by stars. With luck, this new context for the chosen phrase sets off a new series of associations, whether one recognises the source of the quotation or not.

Pictures

The vast realms of space beyond our galaxy are literally beyond our imagination. The cosmos seems to both mock our insignificance and act as a mirror to our ambitions. With our epic fantasies of stellar conquest we reveal our self-absorption. We now stand on a cusp between a further actualisation of these fantasies and a retreat from questioning beyond ourselves. Our ambivalence suggests a loss of faith, somewhere between introspection and the Utopian ideal.

In the work of B Stuven space acts as metaphor for the future goal of technological Utopia. Phrases sometimes obscured by, sometimes obscuring images of stars, serve as ambiguous comment on these dreams of progress. We are left to decide whether they reinforce or undermine our ambivalence towards this impossible ideal.

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