Cold Places
29 May - 01 Aug 2015
© Hugo Canoilas
Love the sunset and dawn, because there is no use in loving them, 2015
Acrylic ink on unprimed linen
320 x 600 cm
photo: Stefan Lux
Love the sunset and dawn, because there is no use in loving them, 2015
Acrylic ink on unprimed linen
320 x 600 cm
photo: Stefan Lux
COLD PLACES
Hugo Canoilas, Nancy Holt, Paul Johnson, Leopold Kessler, Hayley Silverman, Travess Smalley
29 May - 1 August 2015
The glaciers are melting, the water table is rising, droughts are causing streams of refugees to flee their homes, and yet this man-made climate change is still questioned by some people due to snow flurries in April. At the other end, scientists are working on proclaiming a new epoch, the Anthropocene, in which humans have great influence on biological, geological, and atmospheric events on the Earth.
By representing landscape, art gives us a different slant on the world. But aesthetic concepts, be they Nature as a romantically transfigured site of long or post-apocalyptic images of destroyed cities, are subject to constant transformation, just like the world and our perception of it.
The new exhibition at Galerie Andreas Huber deals with the different notions of landscape. Dystopian, mythical, and psychological dimensions of landscape are examined, as is the relation between wilderness and urban life. Nature is not assumed to be “something that is,” but is described as a social construct.
Time plays a central role as well, looking back into the past and forward into the future, and ideas of how any given present relates, related, or will relate to that past or future. A further important motif of the exhibition is the question of the role of human beings and whether we will disappear from thought “... like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.” (Foucault)
Can the categories Nature and Culture be made productive? And where do speculations and hypotheses about a possible other, another world – digital, destroyed, utopian – lead, a world in which human beings are perhaps merely conceived as one of many manifestations, and meaningfulness is not necessarily generated through the relation to a subject? The interest lies not in critiquing the status quo, but in what attempts to get beyond what we already know.
With works by Hugo Canoilas (* 1977, l. in Vienna), Nancy Holt (* 1938, † 2014), Paul Johnson (* 1972, l. in London), Leopold Kessler (* 1976, l. in Vienna), Hayley Silverman (* 1986, l. in New York) and Travess Smalley (* 1986, l. in New York).
Hugo Canoilas, Nancy Holt, Paul Johnson, Leopold Kessler, Hayley Silverman, Travess Smalley
29 May - 1 August 2015
The glaciers are melting, the water table is rising, droughts are causing streams of refugees to flee their homes, and yet this man-made climate change is still questioned by some people due to snow flurries in April. At the other end, scientists are working on proclaiming a new epoch, the Anthropocene, in which humans have great influence on biological, geological, and atmospheric events on the Earth.
By representing landscape, art gives us a different slant on the world. But aesthetic concepts, be they Nature as a romantically transfigured site of long or post-apocalyptic images of destroyed cities, are subject to constant transformation, just like the world and our perception of it.
The new exhibition at Galerie Andreas Huber deals with the different notions of landscape. Dystopian, mythical, and psychological dimensions of landscape are examined, as is the relation between wilderness and urban life. Nature is not assumed to be “something that is,” but is described as a social construct.
Time plays a central role as well, looking back into the past and forward into the future, and ideas of how any given present relates, related, or will relate to that past or future. A further important motif of the exhibition is the question of the role of human beings and whether we will disappear from thought “... like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.” (Foucault)
Can the categories Nature and Culture be made productive? And where do speculations and hypotheses about a possible other, another world – digital, destroyed, utopian – lead, a world in which human beings are perhaps merely conceived as one of many manifestations, and meaningfulness is not necessarily generated through the relation to a subject? The interest lies not in critiquing the status quo, but in what attempts to get beyond what we already know.
With works by Hugo Canoilas (* 1977, l. in Vienna), Nancy Holt (* 1938, † 2014), Paul Johnson (* 1972, l. in London), Leopold Kessler (* 1976, l. in Vienna), Hayley Silverman (* 1986, l. in New York) and Travess Smalley (* 1986, l. in New York).