Wave Theory (2023)
Exhibition | Installations and Photography
"Theories are living and breathing reconfigurings of the world. The world theorises as well as experiments with itself. Figuring, reconfiguring."
-Karen Barad, On Touching - The Inhuman That Therefore I Am.
Wave Theory Exhibition
October 25-30, 2023
The Ionion Centre for Arts and Culture
Metaxata, Kefalonia, Greece
Water, air, light, and sound all share a fundamental capacity that relegates them to the status of a near transcendent substance: they exhibit wave behaviours. A wave is a force or agency which transfers energy from one location to another without transferring matter. A wave therefore renders material properties and produces tangible affects that call into question the orthodoxy of substance. A wave breaks the rules of simple objects; a wave draws us into the sublime and infinite; a wave turns upside-down our assumptions that organise a rational, structured, cause-and-effect world. A wave demands we conceive of new (or old) relations of mattering and therefore new (or old) ethical obligations. This show presents two new bodies of work (one photographic and one videographic) and a third "concept mining" work. Together they explore the ways in which the world disrupts how we know it and suggests instead a diffracted world of infinite possibility.
Wave Theory (2023)
Multi-channel video and sound installation
What happens when we push the concept of performance to the limit and all but remove the human subject from the equation? How does the world think itself into being? Over a week I would place a camera and tripod in different locations along the beach that had become my second home and allowed the camera to capture durations of this “thinking in action”.
I left it to my collaborators, the beach and camera, to decide what the audience should see, how the camera should move, what aspects of the evolving world should by memorialised. The work was installed on two 6-foot-high screens that juxtaposed two different moments. The audience could place themselves inside both moments concurrently or focus on one or the other. The footage rarely produced a vantage point that I, myself, had experienced. The camera could “see” under the water, where I could not. It could focus on both the expansive and the minute. It could determine boundaries and capture interactions. Most wonderfully it could capture the dematerialization of boundaries and the movement inherent in materiality.
Wave Thinking
Text-based Installation
Wave Thinking draws together the thoughts of philosophers, artists, writers, and even students who have (and continue to do so!) helped me think through the nature of materiality throughout my research. The work juxtaposes a series of quotes across three screens. A solitary chair looks on, both as an invitation to the audience and a reminder that their participation as viewer is critical to the action of these words and objects taking form.
Recombinant Light
Photo Essay
I was walking back to the Ionion Centre one night at about 3AM and was struck by what a completely different environment it was rather than in the day. The only illumination was from street and house lights and perhaps the odd car. The penetration of the light dictated what features were visible and which disappeared into the night. In addition, I had a hairline fracture on my lens which in particular circumstances would grab the light creating phantom objects.
