Return of the Repressed

On Exactitude in Science is a one paragraph story by Jorge Luis Borges that portrays a society so obsessed with cartography that ultimately it resorts to producing a map at 1:1 scale, which covers the entire landscape it describes. ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………… The touchstone for this show is a life-size plaster figure made by Antonio Canova in 1807, that is strategically studded with hundreds of small bronze pins. It looks like a proto-digital 3D scan, and essentially it is, describing a form by reducing it to points in space, which Canova then transcribed to a block of marble using a pointing machine. It is simultaneously the thing and the code that describes the thing. Like most of the contents of this show it could also serve as an analogy for our changing sense of corporeality, and the alienation and abstraction being enacted on the human body due to late capitalism, digital technology, AI and social media. The original Canova sculpture stands in the Museo Correr, Venice, but there is a detailed 3d scan of it available online. For this exhibition a 1:1 copy has been printed and the bronze pins manually inserted. It will greet you in the first room of the show, accompanied by a Tatsuo Miyajima ‘clock’ and a lo-fi reconstruction of a Richard Artschwager chair sculpture, two more objects which question our assumptions about the fabric of modern life while also questioning their own integrity. The exhibition, titled ‘Return of the Repressed’, is an independent project curated by Toby Ziegler, presented over three floors of a vacant office block on Heddon Street. The exhibition stages a sequence of conversations between art objects, videos and non-art objects in a series of constructed triangular rooms. Many of the works have a shared logic, a kind of Frankenstein-like approach to deconstructing and reassembling familiar forms in an attempt to make new possibilities for comprehension, but other objects merely function as a counterpoint or punctum. When the viewer emerges from this provisional architecture, constructed like a film set, they find themselves in a larger, more dilapidated space and the triangular room can be apprehended from outside as an object. Including work by: Gillian Carnegie, Ella Fleck, Katrin Hanusch, Hannah Levy, Tatsuo Miyajima, François Morellet, Frida Orupabo, Ahren Warner And work not by: Richard Artschwager, Samuel Beckett, Antonio Canova, Nicolas Poussin, Yan Zhenquing. For additional information contact: [email protected] or @tobyziegler1 on instagram