Exhibition opening: June 30th at 8 PM
Quote club (reading group): July 7th
Artist talk with Brigham Baker: July 14th
Kulturfolger says yes! Playing with references, appropriation, text, images, classification, entities, and myths; blending ideas and collaging time which resists and reworks linear conceptions of history, evolution, and ecology. Kulturfolger is a work in progress and advocates for uncomfortability, uncertainty, ambivalence, abundance, acceptance and embraces the undefined, deviating from the pursuit of truth or the possibility of doubt. A field between scientific and poetic interpretation is occupied. Philosophy, mathematics, sociology, ethnography, science, semiotics, art and the Internet are employed as reflective tools and instruments of access. Kulturfolger wonders how the entropy of the generic influences conditioning and ideas of culture, and how to transcend, transverse, transform current cultural articulations into contemporary conversations? Kulturfolger asks – What is curation in the age of limitless information, multiplicity of identities, voices and opinions? How to explore, explode conditioned expectations through discernment and selection, yet still hold space for a multitude of truths, beings and processes? Apprehending the infinite variety of being through a spectrum, parallelism, through heterogeneous detonations. The world – simultaneously natural, artificial, designed, wild, engineered, rough and sweet contends with our personal parameters shift shaping to our many points of attention. This is our natural environment in which we love the ARTificial.
Let’s reject the idea that nature is an idol, something, an object, an entity and is inherently inadequate, without value or meaning, and that it needs culture to be complete. There is no external nature to provide us with an independent field of action. Let us create “natural acts” which do not subjugate nature to culture. Why wouldn’t we comprehend culture as something that nature does?
***
Every month, new theme, new artwork. Who are the participants in the dialogue, who wants to play by the rules? The artist, curator, the public, Lucretius, Serres? They all have a right to speak in a fugue titled NOISE. The theme for July – noise: cacophony, a constant – an assailing parasite and the one we want to capture, embody and utilize …the noise is an omnipresent consistent chaos (Serres).
From Serres’s noise, over calibration instruments of the river flow, to Lucretius. Let us situate Brigham Baker in this peculiar context – let’s index him through Lucretius and Serres, from antiquity to this day, in a vortex of space matter compiled from an infinite number of atoms which randomly move through space, like specks of dust colliding under rays of sunlight, merging and forming complex structures, only to diverge again in an incessant process of creation and destruction.
Lucretius gives us clinamen which relates to the swerving and deflecting of celestial configurations; from the arch of the Sun and the unpredictable swerve of atoms which move and collide in the Universe. Inclinations, declinations, statues. Lucretius gives us physics before physics.
In the eternal motion of nature, where do we find moments of stasis, contemplation?
We realize that time does not only flow linearly…or laterally, but goes through stop points, cracks, confluences, lightning trajectories, accelerations, rifts, cavities, and all that occurs at random… Time flows in an exceedingly turbulent and chaotic manner; it drips, filters, drains, discharges, washes away, leaks. Serres shows us how chaos and percolation are intertwined.
Can we find traces of clinamen in Brigham Baker’s Reworking Alluvium? Or, perhaps the Universe created in a lightning turbulence where matter and forms of natural and cultural origin are jointly deposited, rearranged; their lightning trajectories deafen the gallery space.
How to inhabit the dynamic threshold between nature and art, control and unpredictability, architecture and randomness of events, the tensions between composition and improvisation, achieving results and fostering the freedom of sound? How to listen to noise? How to play with noise?
Kulturfolger, June, 2017