58. PM/AM at 37 Eastcastle Street. October 2024. (wo)

There appears to be an assumption that when a visionary mind unlocks a secret of humankind, this artefact of knowledge must become an enduring truth. It is archived into our shared history where it remains, in a position of influence that defines and guides aspects of our existence. When you consider that the concept of such truth, based on a notion of correctness when it comes to unpicking the mysteries of ourselves, is itself flawed, this assumption becomes a misconception. Human beings develop throughout time, our societies change, the pillars of knowledge on which we suspend our lives fall and are rebuilt.

The problem we have is that our pursuit of irrefutable knowledge and our desire to truly know ourselves are obsessions, hands reaching out into the cold loneliness of our universe. There is a bias that hopes we never have to question realisations that we have come to anchor ourselves to. Science, psychology and philosophy officiate the obsession, becoming structures inside which our desire to discover our truths flourishes.

In the pre-technological eras of ancient civilisations, methods of comprehension were somewhat different. Moving backwards in time, we see the telescope and dataset dissolve as advanced forms of investigative processes become unavailable, and more informal means of curious engagement with our world take over. Without the assistance of machines and computers a greater sense of intuition takes hold, and with the expectations placed on the pursuit of knowledge lowered, inquisitive minds are free to dream.

Before modern space exploration, mythology distilled the mysteries of the universe into legends and stories, responding to the unknown with no boundary between the distant wonders of the cosmos and the locality of folklore. The natural environment, a forum for contemplation and a source of both food and medicine, was cherished and revered. We had a more direct relationship with festival, ceremony and symbolism, celebrating the harvests, the true nature of Samhain, observing and responding to the solar and lunar cycles. It seems that modern ways of understanding have for all their benefits, shrunken our capacity to imagine, and respond profoundly to our environment. As our culture becomes ever more driven by information, the subtleties of our other senses reduce. As we see more, we feel less. The artists in the show aim to express what appears to be lost—our ability to intuit, to feel the resonance of a world that, even in the frenetic modern age, retains innate phenomenal qualities.

Helen Teede’s intense carmine scene just about unveils a mythical apparition that roams daylit and nocturnal zones. At once vapourous and constructed of soil and earth, its form is transferable across time and space. Katherine Qiyu Su transports us to a realm where the energetic framework of thought becomes the landscape itself, its light and matter distorted in ways that are only possible in the imagination. Mia Chaplin’s painting has a contrastingly grounding quality in its expression of humanity, integrated through her palette and painterly technique with the hues of the idealised natural world. Sonya Derviz inverts the perspective to our own, gazing out at an environment untouched by our stories, theories and histories, but one which we are of course an intractable part. Hwi Hahm’s surreal scenes test the very fabric of representational thought, depicting abstract arrangements that confound the mind. Gaia Ozwyn pushes our dimensional boundary far enough to take us to a time before civilisation, where geology was an emergent idea in a swirl of cascading matter. At this furthest point, we can just about connect to the origins of thought itself.

These multiple lenses on our reality see the body as an ephemeral entity, the external world as a networked sentient being, elemental forces as emotions. Physical forms are amalgamations of divine material with a resonance of combined histories; knowledge itself is depicted as shifting geological nebulae in a void. We are shared into malleable aesthetics, spectral layering of colours, approaches to texture that pull the mind towards, and through the canvas.

Encountering the world with traditional categories broken out like this, into open frameworks, allows us to align ourselves with our surroundings, rather than existing in contrast or conflict. It places us in a better position to draw back over history to a time when reality was an approximation, where deep intuition and stories–folk tales–were as important as truths.

Daniel Mackenzie
October 2024