Evacuating the time scene
krissy collum, chris comer, mat fletcher, chris handran, jess hynd
In time's absence what is new renews nothing; what is present is not contemporary; what is present presents nothing, but represents itself and belongs henceforth and always to return. It isn't, but comes back again. DERRIDA
Fader is something of a strange event. While everywhere 'emerging artists' obsess over the there or immediate in everything, here is assembled a show positively dripping with a nostalgia for the unattainable in art. Grouped with a mind to highlighting their common interest in the construction and experience of immateriality, curator Sandra Selig presents the work of Krissy Collum, Chris Comer, Mat Fletcher, Chris Handran and Jess Hynd as collectively committed to an expression of time's complication, super-fluidity and foregrounding in digital imagery and consumer objects. These artists employ audio-visual technologies as discursive tools, alternately cropping and distending the speed of their communications in order to complicate viewers' perceptions of space and time. Whether it's Comer propelling amorphous video blips at speed across the gallery's curved back-wall, Handran slowing an image of moving clouds to a virtual standstill, Fletcher transmitting near-inaudibly high and low- pitched sounds throughout the space, Collum's synaesthetic pun-transformation of light into sand or Hynd parading the gallery's length for who-knows-how-long, in each instance the effect is the same: a schizophrenic confounding of viewers' perceptions of space and time. Theirs is a garner of work committed to re-timing representation and the gallery space, a mixed yet slick bag of performance, sound, video and traditional object based work examining the nature of timed and ongoing experience.
In Lacanian psychoanalysis, schizophrenia is understood as a failure on the part of the subject to accede into language, as a breakdown of the relationship between