Walking in my mind

23/06/09 – 06/09/09, Hayward Gallery, South Bank Centre, London, United Kingdom, Europe.

So therefore I am

The mind, by fiat is the hub of self willed realization. It finds in art a companion like no other, where twinned with inspiration if it is so able may attain its truest virtue and promise.

On view

The exhibition brings together the uncanny, conceptual, pictorial, surreal, vulgar, humorous and sedate. In the work on view one can observe the manifold inspirations and tangible aspects which they have taken on, the exhibition space is filled but not overcrowded with a good clutch of artists featuring: Charles Avery, Thomas Hirschhorn, Yayoi Kusama, Bo Christian Larsson, Mark Manders, Yoshitomo Nara, Jason Rhoades, Pipilotti Rist, Chiharu Shiota and Keith Tyson.

The largesse of thought

Keith Tyson’s piece is an offering of bewildering magnitude such that it absorbs almost the entire space of the main entrance gallery. This bastion of a piece will engulf, inspire and shock. The iconography and the ideas are so diverse yet remain fresh even though the work was begun in 1997-2009. Seeing this piece contained as a whole while formed of individual atomic ideas harks like a refrain back to thought and the mind showing its often chaotic and non linear nature. Yet still being coherent as a single entity.

Primordial Eschatology

Thomas Hirschorn roles out an expanded, immersive and ultra 3D corporeal experience! Once the viewer is inside the work depending on one’s individual tendency my awaken many feelings among them claustrophobia, exploration, isolation or excitement. The work is cleverly able to – for a moment – decouple the conceptual from its logic and hitch itself to a bizarre humor which the artist is well known for. Being a sculpture whilst also concurrently an installation and possibly even landscape is no small feat. This was the beauty of the piece it managed to achieve a resonance even amid the competing form and content.

Thought and vision

Chiarhu Shiota’s offering was a work, in a way reminiscent of Hirschorn’s but at the other end of the scale. At the perceptive-optical level it was a fascinating piece remarkable for its execution and visual affect. Like observing synaptic pathways and seeing things being recalled in memory. The work is an installation on a small-medium scale, from ceiling to floor there are carefully arranged networks of string-like material that when seen from afar invoke the feeling of looking at something through another apparatus or being immersed within a self contained universe. Interspersed within this ordered chaos are every day objects, almost like thought itself – they are woven into the fabric of the mind.