Ghost Bar
Look in a mirror. No, not at yourself, but at the mirror. Notice, this two-dimensional plane contains as much, or maybe even more, than the room that you stand in. As you shift your weight, see how the perspective within the mirror changes. Get close to the glass, and try to peer around the corner of the reflection into the next room. That unfocussed fringe of space is where we live, leaked from elsewhere, just past the corner of your eye.
You can’t see us, yet, but you will soon.
After the bush fire, cancer diagnosis, old age, rising tides, mutated cuttlefish, invasion, or cheaply manufactured ladder, you will enter the mirror and haunt with us.
After you catch Charon's canoe (bring coin$!), you will also make your home in the mirror place. The mirror place has many names; BooOoooze Saloon, Phantom Tavern, Spirit Parlour, or simply, The Haunt. Never fear, a good time is had by all us here. We are phantoms of the anthropocene, manifested animists who don’t recognise linear time, spooks orchestrating espionage from 6ft underground, pouring libations - here to get you shit-faced after the apocalypse.
We are the smooth pink post-industrial waste of your kitchen spatula and latex gloves. We clog the peat enveloping your precious fossil fuels that power our growing ghost economy. In the mirror everything is backwards - libations are reversed, we pour one out for the unfortunate living homies, our past selves, pottering in mismatched socks, worrying about taxes and whether the iron is switched off. We haunt you from the future, portentous and ominous “oooooOooooOOOOOOoooooO!”, blasting pity and sorrow.
We are your regrets and traumas unresolved, joyfully consuming spirits and digesting mistakes and poisons behind the veil. But in the afterlife, they taste good.
Published by the Ministry of Acute Angles and Reflections
Night Air
Stemming from research into our former understandings of airborne disease, ‘Night Air’ presents an imagined topography of dangerous air. The title is borrowed from the outmoded belief that air at night releases deadly miasmas causing cholera, typhoid, malaria, influenza and pneumonic plague.
The base image for each work is printed using the Japanese suminagashi technique. Ink and oxgall are floated on the surface of water, and gently blown, from which the print on paper is pulled. Curlicues of ink are painted over in colour shifting watercolours, and mirrored vertically to create symmetrical designs reminiscent of both body parts and tendrils of poisonous air polluting a space.
The works are displayed in frames modified to resemble fresh lead solder. Two of the paintings, ‘Gnasher’ and ‘Poison Eater’ have necklaces of upper or lower teeth hung from the bottom edge of frames. The inferred mandible hangs loose, the mouth is open, allowing pneumas and miasmas to permeate the boundary between the interior of the breather and the exterior, and back again. ‘Night Air’ makes the invisible threat visible - we are in danger, and ourselves, dangerous.
Borderstone
By geographical accident, the majority of the marble quarried in Europe comes from those same areas along the E.U’s Mediterranean border (the most deadly border in the world) where unknown numbers of people have attempted to flee war, famine and persecution in Africa and the Middle East. This series of watercolour paintings critiques contemporary European external border practices through the combination of work titles and visual signifiers of obstruction, identity, fascist aesthetics and surveillance. ‘Borderstone’ depicts barricades of marble - the literal ‘stuff-of-this-place’- constructed in order to obstruct the entry of those who are seen as ‘not-of-this-place’.
Since Greco-Roman times marble sculpture has been a signifier of European cultural history and identity, and in antiquity the marble was mined from quarries by slave labourers to build palaces and the statues of empires. In the enlightenment period antique statues became increasingly associated with ideas of race science, not least because the varied skin tone pigments on ancient marble figurative sculptures had worn away.
This later culminated in the 20th C. fascist regimes’ architectural and artistic expressions of racial purity and supremacy in the form white toned marble figures. The fact that some refugee camps are actually situated in marble quarries, where the mourning-work of hewing gravestones takes place, deepens this relationship further. In using the language of marble, ‘Borderstone' loosely references these ideas as being the ideological kernel behind the increasingly inhumane treatment of mostly brown asylum seekers long Europes southern border. The title of each work raises questions around perceptions of the ‘other’, opaque bureaucratic structures, the right to citizenship, militarised borders, the nature of memorialisation, and the E.U.’s intention to construct a completely impervious border.
Cyanometer
Invented by Horace-Bénédict de Saussure in the 18th C., a Cyanometer is a device for measuring the blueness of the sky. It was a circular sheet of paper with up to 52 numbered prussian blue watercolour swatches arranged by tone along the outer edge. One used it by comparing the swatches at different altitudes and times of day and noting the corresponding numbers between 1 and 52. De Saussure correctly surmised that the saturation of blue was dependant on the number of particles suspended in the atmosphere, and that as there are fewer particles suspended above the viewer at higher altitude, the blue appears markedly deeper.
Hand painted in gradated iridescent electric blue watercolour and ultramarine gouache, ‘Cyanometer’ depicts a grid overlaid with a thicker distorted lattice, with the blue gradation shifting in the opposite direction. Unlike the original cyanometer device, this painting ambivalently offers no distinct differentiation between the different shades of blue, and no corresponding measurements, pointing to both the lyrical and absurd motivation to measure the sky.
Big Bang
‘Big Bang’ is a 15 frame autostereogram GIF flashing the words “If we could see far enough we would see the big bang in every direction”. For the viewer to see the words, they must treat it as a ‘magic eye’. To achieve this, the viewer must refocus their eyes to a non-visible place behind the wall of the projection, at which point the words will appear to float above the background static. Scientists currently believe that about 1% of TV static is interference created by leftover radiation from the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago.
By starting the sentence with ‘IF’, the work questions the limits of understanding the origins of the observable universe. The observable universe is only 90 billion light years in diameter. The spherical area of the observable universe is delineated by the time it has taken for light from galaxies or other phenomena to reach earth since the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago, balanced against the acceleration of the expansion of space in between, as galaxies beat a hasty retreat away from us. The act of seeing on a cosmological scale allows us to time travel, in a way, because in the millions of years that the light takes to reach earth, the originating galaxy has changed or may not even exist any more. This allows us to see the past happen in real time as it were.
The age of the universe is not equal to the size of the universe in lightyears, because space expands at a speed greater than the speed of light . As these lights do not move towards us with the same speed that the galaxy retreats, the content of the observable universe is always becoming less, because light, objects and information are steadily falling off the edge (which functions in a way similar to an event horizon) of the observable universe. ‘Big Bang’ references these ideas by inviting the viewer to shift their focal point beyond the static blue barrier of the sky to see the information behind.
Trillion$ Await (ASTEROID/SPACE acts)
Trillion$ Await (ASTEROID/SPACE acts)’ critiques the tech-utopian promise of unlimited wealth to be mined from asteroids, and the new legal framework supporting commercial property rights in outer space. Made at the same time as the series 'Atlas', ‘Trillion$ Await (ASTEROID/SPACE acts) expands upon some of the questions raised in the earlier work around whether we will treat outer space in the same extractive vein as we have historically treated the earth.
The first half of the title is lifted from an asteroid mining powerpoint found by Lennon online. The presentation, a pitch to venture capitalists, details Deep Space Industry’s plan to send probes into outer space with the view to lasso them and drag them back to earth, as they believe many of these asteroids are composed of precious metals. A cylindrical projection of one such platinum rich asteroid was sourced online and used as one compositional component, behind a grid of gold interference paint.
The second half of the title ‘(ASTEROID/SPACE acts)’ are two laws (and laboured acronyms) passed by U.S. congress in the Obama years contravening (and possibly violating) the 1967 Outer Space Act and the 1979 Moon Treaty, allowing private companies to profiteer from resources in outer space. The interim years have seen exponential growth in the private space exploration sector, infamously by billionaires Branson, Thiel, Bezos and Musk.
'FLOATING ISLANDS' OLIVIA LENNON + ERIN MITCHELL
EXGIRLFRIEND GALLERY, MARCH 2018
In light of shifting economic and political currents and dramatic changes in our global climate, Floating Islands examines humanity’s growing fascination with the potential of emerging technologies and their role in reshaping, if not transcending, the physical limitations of our planet, our bodies, and our understanding of society.
Paralleling the development of new ventures from lauded billionaire tech magnates—including Elon Musk’s SpaceX program and recent Falcon Heavy rocket launch, PayPal Founder Peter Thiel’s ongoing seasteading nation-state project in East Asia, and Asgardia, the first prototype for an independent nation in space—Floating Islands proposes an alternate look into the proselytization of these proposed utopias and the futures they postulate. In exploring the aesthetics of these speculative societies, artists Erin Mitchell and Olivia Lennon suggest new perspectives into these brave new worlds and offer an opportunity to reexamine these abstract propositions of the future.
Working within the idealized natural imagery of preloaded computer desktop wallpaper, Erin Mitchell uses scale and 3D rendering technologies to create immersive installations which allow us to physically enter to the virtual environments of our desktop backgrounds. Drawing directly from public domain stock images, Mitchell uses rendering software to digitally recreate these images to a size that can be printed to human scale and returned to the physical context of the gallery space. In blurring the lines between the idealized photographic representation of nature, its virtual translation, and its reintroduction back into the physical environment, Mitchell creates a unique feedback loop that calls into question the boundaries between our distinct but overlapping experiences in both physical and virtual space.
Olivia Lennon presents two works critiquing the economic rationale of our future moments into outer space. ’Space invaders (space wear for the intergalactic immigrant of tomorrow)’ is constructed from space blankets, which were first invented for the nationalist utopian exploration of outer space, but are now most commonly employed in survival situations. ‘Trillion$ Await (ASTEROID/SPACE acts)’ critiques the tech-utopian promise of unlimited wealth to be mined from asteroids, and the new legal framework supporting commercial property rights in outer space.
Mitchell and Lennon, both international citizens floating far from the borders of their own respective nations of origin, reconstruct the gallery space itself as its own floating island and independent satellite for the duration of the exhibition. Accessible via its physical entry point at Holsteinische Str. 18 in Berlin, Germany (52°27’53.424”N, 13°19’51.815”E), visitors are encouraged to enter into this fabricated future environment as new potential citizens and reimagine their own place and future selves within its intangible borders.
‘Space Invaders’ (space wear for the intergalactic immigrants of tomorrow) was made with the indispensable assistance of Nuria Heyck
ZERO
A Klein bottle is a theoretical 4 dimensional continuous surface that constitutes both an interior and exterior, but has no boundary between the two. By extension, it has no volume but also contains the whole universe - it is nothing and everything concurrently. Lennon has painted grids projected over diagrams of Klein bottles as a analogy for the artists’ attempts to quantify and understand this impossible shape.
Each work has an irrational equation for a title. The titles present both the word ‘zero’ and the name of pre-socratic philosopher ‘Zeno’, who is best known for his writing on paradoxes and irrational numbers.
In profile, the Klein bottle resembles a lemniscate ( ∞ ), and from below a zero. 0 and ∞ represent both the divisible and accumulative aspects of infinity .These two numbers and the Klein bottle behave like the Ouroboros snake, constantly eating its own tail. 0 and ∞ are neither multipliable or divisible (e.g. 0 x 1 = 0 or ∞ /2 = ∞ ) as other numbers are, and are so self referential and infinitely regressive, that they could be thought of as boundary of perception.
Atlas
16th C. Cartographer Gerardus Mercator first used the word ‘atlas’ in the geographical discipline to indicate a thesis on the creation, history and description of the whole universe. ‘Atlas’ presents two paintings depicting distorted elliptical projections of the Cosmic Microwave Background in the Mercator Projection. These images draw from the topographical impossibility of designing a map that comprise the entirety of a manifold; whether it is the sphere of the earth rendered flat or the recording of time and distance described in the CMB map of the big bang. The presentation of the big bang, in the same Mercator projection as the earth is often depicted, encourages the viewer to slip between the history of navigation on earth and the possibility of human endeavour to the edge of the universe. Will we approach interstellar exploration in the same vein as intercontinental? The mythological Atlas held the earth upon his shoulders, and as we move into outer space, the weight of the universe moves onto ours.
Cosmodrome
‘Cosmodrome’ offers a dynamic model of the epistemology of the cosmos. These vinyl and watercolour images are carefully painted by hand with fine sable brushes, sometimes using only one or two hairs. Most of the watercolours Lennon uses are made of interference pigments. These pigments contain no colour in the usual sense as they are grains of the translucent mineral mica thinly electroplated in different thicknesses of titanium white. The thickness of the titanium determines the angle of refraction of light above the paint, creating the optical illusion of colour.
This process of painting colour with light references a statement by John Ruskin from 1884 that ‘’Light is as much the ordering of intelligence as the ordering of vision’’. This sentiment informs much of Lennon’s inquiry around the historical and contemporary ‘ordering’ of knowledge about the universe. Each of Lennon’s paintings present a different facet of observation or speculation around the working of time, telemetry, space and matter. Lennon’s work is informed by the philosophical arguments of Heraclitus and Parmenides, the cosmological writings of Italo Calvino, the telemetry of satellites, and conflicting theories in particle physics.
To analyse what we see or think about the universe reveals much of human psychology; essentially whether we believe that the universe is inherently ordered or chaotic. Frequently, ordered views of the cosmos are built over history then disintegrated by unintuitive theories and new discoveries. The geocentric solar system is replaced by the heliocentric. Newtonian physics are replaced by general relativity, then by quantum physics. All encompassing models of knowledge in this paradigm are deconstructed by competing chaotic details which then in turn establish new ordered principles.