My work looks at how narratives and technologies configure our image of poetry and authority and in turn are affected by them. In this show, the central motif began as naïve drawings of buildings along a street. This was arranged in grid-like patterns and developed into a series of unique photochemical prints: Plans. The Plans are suggestive of everything from architectural layouts to punch cards and circuit boards but also evoke older ordering systems like maps, tables, icons and totems. The digital video Shop Window follows the breakdown of perceptually continuous images into discrete blocks of information. The hand-drawn work The Sea seeks a grand harmony of the whole. Together, they point to a history of interventions aimed at managing uncertainty and making the world a more predictable place.
But, while marveling at the rhythms of modernity and the acuity of human vision, the works also embody more ominous expressions of this ordering drive. The construction of Plans is curiously monolithic. Their autistic repetition is enacted on a field of unyielding black. If The Sea finds its harmony, it is in the violence of the mark. And the algorithm that resolves the pixels of Shop Window is opaque. Surveying the windfall that flows from the tragic human ability to recognize pattern, animal.spirit.algorithm references themes of information, environments, action and authority. It is a meditation on design in its broadest sense.
– Abraham George
