⌘X⌘V

5^th July – 2^nd August 2019

Some would argue since the early 1990’s we have been blindly speeding through the digital age, privacy issues, anxieties and mental health concerns filling up our lives, while our children’s addiction to gaming continues unabated. Studies have told us that our changing social interactions are making us less empathic, more superficial and ruder. The mushrooming of CCTV and GPS in our city landscapes and on our devices, mapping our movements, the data copulating with unseen algorithms that ‘computationally think’ for us, means we will never be far away from what we want or might want, or what we need or might need, now, or at some well designed point in the future. More accurate than a psychic at a fun fair but nevertheless wild and untamed. 

“⌘X⌘V” is a new series of exhibitions exploring Art in this new existential age, artists embracing change, working with it, or maybe critically reflecting the negative consequences of it. “⌘X⌘V” is a computer keyboard shortcut symbol for a traditional artistic practice, and therefore a symbol of the layers of time, binary code and pixels technology, as well as the tangibility of art, and where we go now with the Cut and Paste. 

Collage can be a fundamental sketching tool for compositions, working out layers, textures, colours, maybe before the artist paints or sculpts, or maybe as the final product.  Images are cut onto and around each other, both still and moving images, in time and in video. Alex Schady, Wendy Anderson and David Webster are some of the artists in the show who do just that, transcending any historical notions of the shortcomings of collage; far beyond old criticisms of cultural appropriation, the borrowing of images, the political propaganda, the advertising, the fashion. Or are they? Is all that even so bad? Howard Dyke finds images on the Internet and works with gestural intentions he finds in colours and paint. Mick Finch’s ‘Book of Knowledge’ collages images from a childhood encyclopaedia, the old-time internet.

Artists: Wendy Anderson / Howard Dyke / Mick Finch / Mary Johnson / David Lane & Yuan Zhang / Alex Schady / Dave Webster