CELESTIAL CONTRAKT is an exhibition curated by Christina Mitrentse and Jonas Ranson which opens at Schwartz Gallery on Thursday 12 November and runs until 6 December 2009. The gallery is open Friday-Sunday 12-6pm.
The Private View takes place 6-10pm on Thursday 12 November 2009.
The exhibition will feature works by
Dominic Allan . Nikos Alexiou . Alex Bunn . Andrew Hladky . Bern Roche Farrelly . Stine Ljungdalh . Christina Mitrentse . Jonas Ranson . Lee Wagstaff . Marc Wayland
Also on the Opening Night there will be Music by DOUCE ANGOISSE and Audio Mixes by EXITJESUS
Late Night View until 9pm ( First Thursdays ) 3 December
Artist talk 2pm Saturday 28 November.
The exhibition Celestial Contrakt navigates through the terrain of the ‘celestial and ‘ethereal’ in an attempt to offer different entry and exit points to the theme and suggests alternate possibilities within the experiential environments. Schwartz Gallery is formed as an uncharted territory which provisionally describes two conceptions of artworks as ‘terrestrial’ and ‘celestial’. These create non-linear journeys that look beyond Materialist thought. The project brings artist and viewer together to a conception in which the ‘terrestrial’ world does not yet exist and can only arise in the sphere of the imagination. A diverse group of international and London-based artists become wanderers in space and time, drawing from a vast fluid field of collective ideas. The celestial as the nocturnal experience filters through from anthropological investigations, focusing on the ontological dimension; the impulse of irrationality in scientific and architectural artifacts and the surreal poetics of contemporary technology which appear to have cosmological associations. If morning is characterized by surprise, expectation, and regeneration, darkness procures a different type of sentiment and consciousness. The premise of night engages many mythical poetic figurations inextricably linked to the nocturnal walk under the canopy of theconstellation.
Suggesting a state of irrational mystical delirium, the two-dimensional works, film, sculptural objects and performance, shed ‘light’ on the perception of quasiscientific phenomena. They can be characterized as positing the supremacy of hallucination, generating illusions from different time and space. The implication is one that places the artists in a position of pre-reflective mysticism. The content of works come alive and give birth to other bodies, free from materiality and gravity. Rather than an opaque geometry, we suggest an all pervading ethereality that is uncontrollable and ungraspable, causing a fusion between the physical and the metaphysical, the familiar and the unspecified. This manifestation serves to offset the potentially ‘oppressive effect’ of ‘earth bound’ conceptual content. Within this context Celestial Contrakt is a positive vision of chaos and complexity that proposes the deconstruction of our conceptual mechanism.
