Curated
by Bill Jeffries
“In
the absence of any specific constraints, very big gravitationally
sculpted structures will tend to evolve into spheroids. An object’s
gravity tries to pull all of its material, be it rocks, stars,
or dark matter, as close to its center as possible. The outcome
is a sphere.”
- Arif Babul
“The idea that life is a thing of shape
– such is the thesis we associate with the old and respectable
expression of the sphere, borrowed from the ancient philosophers
and geometers. This idea suggests that life, the constitution
of spheres, and thought, are different expressions that designate
the same thing.”
- Peter Sloterdijk, from the introduction to Sphären.
Presentation
House Gallery opens the fall exhibition season with an international
group exhibition of contemporary explorations of ‘the sphere’.
The spheres selected for the show range from the microbiological
to the cosmological, and include several explorations of the
most photographed sphere of all, the human head. These crania
are presented as both idealized forms and mutated spheroids.
Over
the past thirty years, as ‘global’-ization and ‘spheres
of influence’ have had an increasingly large impact on
the public sphere, many artists have been working around the
new subject-area that the Dutch/German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk
has recently coined as Spherology. Sloterdijk’s neologism
is the subject of his three contentious books, titled Sphären.
They have generated much debate in Europe, in part because he
has extended and emphasized the notion that the fundamental
importance of spheres reaches beyond science and into philosophy
and art.
The
ubiquity and simplicity of the sphere-as-idea provided the organizing
principle for the exhibition. Although SPHERE is an exhibition
that can be theorized in complex ways, the images in it are
seductively easy to look at. Each artist in SPHERE had specific
reasons for working with the ideas and images in the show, but,
taken as a group, they have mapped out some of the analytical
possibilities in art for the fundamental strangeness, mystery
(Lindsay Seers) and beauty of spheres. The spheres presented
here are cultural artifacts (William Eakin) as well as metaphysical
phenomena (Holly Armishaw). These works explore and analyze
many spherical possibilities including the links between the
lost ideals of Renaissance Humanism (Geoffrey Smedley) and contemporary
ironic concerns (Laurie Simmons/Allan McCollum); between decay
(Lynda Gammon) and entropy; between mutation (Daniel Lee, Paul
McCarthy) and evolution’s crooked arrow.
The
human cranium as a constructed sphere is examined in the works
by Deanne Achong, Paul McCarthy, Michael Euyung Oh, and Geoffrey
Smedley. The sphere as an artifact of natural forces is at the
basis of Susan Coolen’s practice, and Lisa Klapstock works
with found holes that, as images, are spheres formed from negative
space. Bruce Nauman’s late 1960s conceptual work Untitled
(Body as a Sphere) receives its first-ever performances as part
of this exhibition.
SPHERE
may be a speculative foray into the world of Spherology, but
it is also meant to raise questions about how humans choose,
and overlook, subjects in art and in science. Spheres, as a
separate subject, have been outside the current paradigms in
both areas, taken for granted, perhaps, as part of the background
noise of the universe. It could be proposed, for instance, that
the history of ideas itself, as a ‘working around the subject
of knowledge’, can be seen as a spherical entity in which
the accumulation of information enlarges the size of the bubble
of knowledge.
Science
in SPHERE
The exhibition features two projects drawn directly from recent
scientific research. Dr. Arif Babul at the University of Victoria
has created the first computer-generated simulation of the upcoming
collision between the Milky Way and its neighbour galaxy, Andromeda.
This will be shown as a video loop. A selection of colorful
viruses imaged by Dr. Jean-Yves Sgro at the University of Wisconsin
will be shown as framed works representing the microbiological
end of the spherical spectrum.
