Trying To Cope With Things That Aren't Human (Part One) analysing the relationships between our encounter with the natural world and the invented world.

Abstract or description

This exhibition was developed around an interest in the relationships between our encounters with the natural world and the invented world. Often separated out, in terms of how we experience and problematise our world, this line of enquiry seeks to discuss where overlaps occur and how artists respond to the complexities of our ability to comprehend and engage with nature and technology.
This was a curated exhibition and publication that toured and developed, in each iteration, at three galleries in 2009. The exhibition featured new commissions by: Mariele Neudecker, Richard T. Walker, Richard Hughes, Alex Pearl, Heather and Ivan Morison, Alan Currall and Johanna Hällsten. The show also included works by Annika Ström, Ryan Gander, Marcus Coates and Ian Brown. The publication included new commissions by Paul Rooney, Francis McKee, Annika Ström, Richard T. Walker, Ian Brown, Alex Pearl, Heather and Ivan Morison and Ryan Gander.
Exhibited at David Cunningham Projects, San Francisco (January 22nd, 2009 - February 28th, 2009, AirSpace Gallery, Stoke-on-Trent (28th March – 9th May 2009), and Cell Project Space, London (26th September –25th October 2009)
The exhibition was reviewed in Art Monthly by Martin Herbert, Artforum (online) by Glen Helfand (critics pick) and previewed and reviewed in The Guardian and Artists Newsletter. After the exhibition in San Francisco I was invited back to deliver a presentation on the exhibition at the California College of the Arts for the fine art and curatorial programmes.
Mariele Neudecker’s commissioned work, 400 Thousand Generations, was included in the Royal Academy exhibition Earth: Art in a Changing Planet. Paul Rooney’s Letters That Rot Into Mulch was performed at Existential Territories at Toynbee Studios, London, became an installation at his solo show at Edinburgh Sculpture Studios and was included in his publication Dust and Other Stories edited by Jeremy Akerman and Eileen Daly.

Item Type:	Show/Exhibition
Additional Information:	The exhibition was reviewed in Art Monthly by Martin Herbert, Artforum (online) by Glen Helfand (critics pick) and previewed and reviewed in The Guardian and Artists Newsletter. “Parked outside the gallery is a 13-year-old Fiat Cinquecento, a vehicle that has seen better days and appears to know it. Across the top of its windscreen, in the space traditionally reserved for a ‘Wayne Loves Sharon’ decal, is a sun-strip that reads ‘Eventually I will rust and die’. The car belongs to the gallery owner, but the concept – and the lovingly miniaturised version of the same car inside the venue, whose scaled-down sticker says, slightly threateningly, ‘Before I go I will take some of you with me’ – belongs to Ian Brown. This 12-artist show’s curator (and one-third of artists’ group Common Culture), Brown has come up with what is, if not a wholly original idea, one that I have never seen articulated in an art context. While any number of exhibitions over the last decade have anatomised our alienated relationship to nature, and while our uneasy interaction with an increasingly technological, man-made world remains grist for dystopian cyberneticists, this show sees both as interconnected hemispheres of a ‘non-human’ realm that we struggle to accommodate ourselves to, sentimentalising, and anxiously personalising, fearing it by turns.” Martin Herbert, Art Monthly 326, May 2009. The Mariele Neudecker commissioned work 400 Thousand Generations went on to be included in the major Royal Academy exhibition Earth: Art in a Changing Planet. Paul Rooney’s Letters That Rot Into Mulch, commissioned for the publication, was performed at Existential Territories at Toynbee Studios, London, became an installation at his solo show at Edinburgh Sculpture Studios and was included in the book Dust and Other Stories by Paul Rooney Edited by Jeremy Akerman and Eileen Daly ISBN 978 0 9556540 5 3 Works commissioned for the exhibition: http://www.morison.info/iusedtoloveher.html http://www.marieleneudecker.co.uk/marieleneudeckee.html http://richardtwalker.net/everything_goes_as_if_it_is_always_away.html http://richardtwalker.net/its_hard_to_find_because__i_cant_see_what_you_mean_to_me.html http://www.ibrown.co.uk/ibrown.co.uk/eventually.html
Faculty:	Previous Faculty of Arts and Creative Technologies > Art and Design
Event Location:	San Francisco
Event Dates:	Jan - Feb 2009
Depositing User:	Ian BROWN
Date Deposited:	26 Apr 2013 15:52
Last Modified:	24 Feb 2023 13:37
Related URLs:	Organisation Organisation Organisation
URI:	https://eprints.staffs.ac.uk/id/eprint/888

Item Type:

Show/Exhibition

Additional Information:

The exhibition was reviewed in Art Monthly by Martin Herbert, Artforum (online) by Glen Helfand (critics pick) and previewed and reviewed in The Guardian and Artists Newsletter. “Parked outside the gallery is a 13-year-old Fiat Cinquecento, a vehicle that has seen better days and appears to know it. Across the top of its windscreen, in the space traditionally reserved for a ‘Wayne Loves Sharon’ decal, is a sun-strip that reads ‘Eventually I will rust and die’. The car belongs to the gallery owner, but the concept – and the lovingly miniaturised version of the same car inside the venue, whose scaled-down sticker says, slightly threateningly, ‘Before I go I will take some of you with me’ – belongs to Ian Brown. This 12-artist show’s curator (and one-third of artists’ group Common Culture), Brown has come up with what is, if not a wholly original idea, one that I have never seen articulated in an art context. While any number of exhibitions over the last decade have anatomised our alienated relationship to nature, and while our uneasy interaction with an increasingly technological, man-made world remains grist for dystopian cyberneticists, this show sees both as interconnected hemispheres of a ‘non-human’ realm that we struggle to accommodate ourselves to, sentimentalising, and anxiously personalising, fearing it by turns.” Martin Herbert, Art Monthly 326, May 2009. The Mariele Neudecker commissioned work 400 Thousand Generations went on to be included in the major Royal Academy exhibition Earth: Art in a Changing Planet. Paul Rooney’s Letters That Rot Into Mulch, commissioned for the publication, was performed at Existential Territories at Toynbee Studios, London, became an installation at his solo show at Edinburgh Sculpture Studios and was included in the book Dust and Other Stories by Paul Rooney Edited by Jeremy Akerman and Eileen Daly ISBN 978 0 9556540 5 3 Works commissioned for the exhibition: http://www.morison.info/iusedtoloveher.html http://www.marieleneudecker.co.uk/marieleneudeckee.html http://richardtwalker.net/everything_goes_as_if_it_is_always_away.html http://richardtwalker.net/its_hard_to_find_because__i_cant_see_what_you_mean_to_me.html http://www.ibrown.co.uk/ibrown.co.uk/eventually.html

Faculty:

Previous Faculty of Arts and Creative Technologies > Art and Design

Event Location:

San Francisco

Event Dates:

Jan - Feb 2009

Depositing User:

Ian BROWN

Date Deposited:

26 Apr 2013 15:52

Last Modified:

24 Feb 2023 13:37