Sara Hughes
27 Mar - 12 Apr 2009
SARA HUGHES
"Feedback Runaway"
27th March – 12th April 2009, Studio 3
Opening: Thursday, 26th March 2009, from 7 pm
SARA HUGHES’s work investigates the visual impact of specific structures, codes and numbers on the viewer. In face of a flood of media ‘explainingg’ the world to us and simultaneously regulating it, she is particularly interested in visual structures that convey information and often adopt the form of statistical graphics in the media. In “Feedback Runaway” Hughes transforms the exhibition space into an image of our hectic age and its flood of visual stimuli. She takes her starting material – numerical statistics – from a range of sources, so that her brightly-coloured pie-charts painted onto canvas address and represent content as different as e.g. terror-statistics and a Cosmopolitan questionnaire.
Also painted onto canvas, her bar charts are precise realisations of actual stock-exchange indexes, which Hughes took from the economics section of the FAZ.
A pie-chart sculpture made of foam gives the visitor a place to sit, and diagrams made of coloured adhesive vinyl on the ceiling vie with line diagrams shooting in wild zigzags across the walls and floor like temperature graphs. These arbitrarily combined visual reproductions of sometimes important and sometimes trivial statistical content compete for the viewerr’s attention on equal terms here. However, “Feedback Runaway” is also about the messages and signals that are created through the interaction of colours and forms, and so Sara Hughes’ work also conveys reminders of the Bauhaus School; echoes of Kandinsky or paintings by Josef Albers.
Sara Hughes holds a fellowship from Creative New Zealand in the context of our International Studio Programme.
"Feedback Runaway"
27th March – 12th April 2009, Studio 3
Opening: Thursday, 26th March 2009, from 7 pm
SARA HUGHES’s work investigates the visual impact of specific structures, codes and numbers on the viewer. In face of a flood of media ‘explainingg’ the world to us and simultaneously regulating it, she is particularly interested in visual structures that convey information and often adopt the form of statistical graphics in the media. In “Feedback Runaway” Hughes transforms the exhibition space into an image of our hectic age and its flood of visual stimuli. She takes her starting material – numerical statistics – from a range of sources, so that her brightly-coloured pie-charts painted onto canvas address and represent content as different as e.g. terror-statistics and a Cosmopolitan questionnaire.
Also painted onto canvas, her bar charts are precise realisations of actual stock-exchange indexes, which Hughes took from the economics section of the FAZ.
A pie-chart sculpture made of foam gives the visitor a place to sit, and diagrams made of coloured adhesive vinyl on the ceiling vie with line diagrams shooting in wild zigzags across the walls and floor like temperature graphs. These arbitrarily combined visual reproductions of sometimes important and sometimes trivial statistical content compete for the viewerr’s attention on equal terms here. However, “Feedback Runaway” is also about the messages and signals that are created through the interaction of colours and forms, and so Sara Hughes’ work also conveys reminders of the Bauhaus School; echoes of Kandinsky or paintings by Josef Albers.
Sara Hughes holds a fellowship from Creative New Zealand in the context of our International Studio Programme.