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representing nothing...., Installation View
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representing nothing..., Installation View, Jefford Horrigan,
parts of the performance" The Actor Who Played Cleopatra",
performed live 9th June and 6th July 2012
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Stefanos Tsivopoulos, representing nothing...,Installation View
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Appau Junior Boakye-Yiadom, Drum, 2012, videostill
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Sovay Berriman, representing nothing, ...Installation View
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"representing nothing" , Gallery 1 and 2
Sovay Berriman, Rebecca Birch, Are Blytt, Appau Junior Boakye-Yiadom, Leonie Lachlan, Jefford Horrigan
and Stefanos Tsivopoulos
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The Agency is pleased to present a curated group exhibition, which experimentally likens minimalism to subtraction.
In definition subtraction is used to model four related processes:
1. From a given collection, take away (subtract) a given number of objects.
2. From a given measurement, take away a quantity measured in the same units.
3. Compare two like quantities to find the difference between them.
4. To find the distance between two locations at a fixed distance from starting point.
In mathematics it is often useful to view or define subtraction as a kind of addition, the addition of the additive inverse. We can view 7-3=4 as the sum of two terms: 7 and -3. This perspective allows us to apply to subtraction all of the familiar rules and nomenclature of addition.
The minimalist aesthetic has occupied all of high modernity and beyond and continues to engage artists in the seesaw debate between meaning and form. The void, emptiness or silence is an acceptable formal device to make poignant statements about the importance of thought or gesture. The less is there the more affecting the gesture becomes.
Representing Nothing... does not seek to explicate the void or any affiliates. On the contrary, all works contain representative imagery of recognizable events or formalisms with titles, which reveal densely layered meanings. On all levels of communication within the show, however, a slippage occurs from meaning to non-meaning, from being to non-being and its reverse. The exhibition observes how meanings can oscillate between political power symbolism and formally and historically defunct ballast as is the case in Stefanos Tsivopolous' video Lost Monument or in the reductionism of Sovay Berriman's Porned , a series of limited edition print symbols referring to no action or designation.
The exhibition spans all media featuring Appau Junior Boakye-Yiadom's exceedingly short videoclips of pointed occurrences or acts, Leonie Lachlan's works on paper featuring flammable substances and Are Blytt's almost perfectly white oil paintings. The final act of inversion will hinge on the performative or performance related explorations of Rebecca Birch and Jefford Horrigan, neither of which require a direct presence in the space but may manifest on location as an object or occurrence. Taking slippage as a given premise in the process of thinking all the works presented could have arisen or may yet arise as a subtraction of meanings from an original starting point, a formal given, a future or past potentiality. It is important that none of the works deny meaning nor represent the stripping away of meaning as a gesture. On the contrary, their correlations are the trajectory to their essence.
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