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The Possibility of an Island

Gallery14 July – 18 August 2012

Cory Arcangel, Jacqueline Bebb, Paul Antony Carr, Tomas Chaffe, Stuart Croft, Jason Dodge, Sean Edwards, Joanne Masding and Andrew Sunderland.

Curated by Tim Dixon

Separated from a landmass and surrounded by sea, an island can appear a self-sufficient and closed unit, set apart from the world by its distinct language and custom, sitting in relation to and juxtaposed against an other. The very condition of an island’s possibility lies in its removal from something else, its displacement from a network of external influences that governs its being and gives it form. As such its relative autonomy is in fact contingent upon a range of factors that make it so.

The work of these nine international artists set questions of autonomy and contingency into play. The works, in video, drawing and sculpture, question their relationship to, and separation from, a world external to themselves.

Through strategies of isolation and displacement, the artists bring forth material elements from circulation in a larger context and enact processes which separate them from the world; the works extract themselves from their wider networks in order to become visible.

Both the objects and this exhibition are produced through processes of removal, selection and fragmentation. Implied within this is a reflection on the curatorial process and the nature of the curated group show; a construct in which individual works are brought into relation with others and both create and sit within a context.

Read a review of the show by William Davie for Aesthetica.