Alembic II: Chrominance
Maggie Roberts & Ayesha Tan Jones
24 March – 28 April 2018 (open by appointment over Easter weekend)
Friday 23 March 6-9pm exhibition preview
Thursday 12 April 7pm Maggie Roberts and Ayesha Tan Jones in conversation [online]
Friday 27 April 6-9pm closing event with performance by Ayesha Tan Jones
Maggie Roberts aka Mer, MIASMA, 2018, mixed media incl. plaster, wooden branches, inflatable birthing pool, transferable tattoos, bird’s nest, copper wires, electronic wires, amethyst, bismuth, shungite, moss, black mirrors, iphone screens, circuit boards, iphone insides, wax, water from River Lea oil spill, black obsidian foraged from Obsidian Butte California, quartz crystals, faux hair, witch fingers, carbon tracing tattoo paper, minerals from a geyser in Iceland, stone from white cliffs of Beachy Head, mugwort, thyme, marigold, lavender and rosemary. Both works commissioned by Res. Photo: Tim Bowditch.
Details of Psychic Excavations: The Parasites of Pangu, Ayesha Tan Jones, 2018. All photos: Tim Bowditch.
Details of Psychic Excavations: The Parasites of Pangu, Ayesha Tan Jones, 2018. All photos: Tim Bowditch.
Stills from MIASMA, Maggie Roberts aka Mer, 2018, single screen HD video 16:13
The second exhibition in Alembic brings together a newly commissioned video work by Maggie Roberts and new sculptural works by Ayesha Tan Jones, to form a post-anthropocene ecocide narrative. Here the artists share an approach that amounts to a ritual transmutation of mainframe data and earthly substance.
Developed on the edgelands of Capetown, Maggie Roberts’ new video work MIASMA combines filmed and animated waterways with various algorithmic processing methods including datamoshing (a form of unpredictable video distortion), Google’s psychedelic DeepDream image generator, and the pulsing laser of a LiDAR 3D scanner. Formed of collaged spectral mirages and swirling shadow objects MIASMA plays out over multiple registers, as the viewpoint switches from macro to micro, from inside to outside – the body and skin of the landscape becoming a transparent digital wireframe matrix under the eye of the LiDAR.
Overseeing the synthetic transformation of these collaged liminal landscapes, an androgynous swamp demon directs the flows of water, summoning its clogging. This spectral creature shapeshifts, becoming infected by the environments it inhabits, simultaneously calling forth an entropic ritual breakdown and a spiralling positive feedback loop that spontaneously generates endless blooms to clog both the liquid and data channels, triggering increasing disorder and environmental disaster.
Roberts is a member of ‘hive mind’ 0rphan Drift (0D), a collaborative artist that coalesced in London in 1994. MIASMA presents 0D’s signature ‘form-dissolving, ego-melting, boundary-haemorrhaging’[1] (eco)feminism that has its roots in 0D’s early experiments with automated image processing – an ‘analogue machine vision’ that was produced by sampling domestic VCR magnetic tape in combination with digital replication ‘glitches’.
Ayesha Tan Jones’ sculptural works populate a parallel undead living landscape where, through the toxicity of the earth, new life springs forth. Constructed from materials of the earth: sticks, crystals, herbs, ash, moss, and embedded with outcrops of defunct digital technology, these forms trace the narrative of an optimystically dystopian world. Drawing on the Chinese creation myth of Pangu, where the body of the mythical Pangu formed the earth and the parasites on their body became people, the installation forms a syncretic mytho-mystic fusion, presenting Tan Jones’ formula for a ‘queer, genderless, whytch filled, post-consumer, optimystic, anti capitalist, feminist dystopia’.
An ancient sacred technology, the objects are arranged in a formation reminiscent of a stone circle, with one stone lying on its side as a ‘recumbent’ – a common feature in Neolithic stone circles utilised for ritual practice relating to the moon and aligned to the arc of the lunar (rather than solar) sky. These hybrid objects are scratched, burned and collaged with alchemical symbols and runes that are traces of Tan Jones’ cyberdruid characters featured in their video works. One of these cross-cultural symbols, the triquetra (most commonly known as the celtic trinity knot), is traditionally representative of the synthesis of three interlinking archetypes – mother, crone, maiden; mind, body, spirit; earth, sea, sky. Amidst these ancient symbols are the flaking, quasi-‘tribal’, remains of tattoo transfers and ‘home-cooked’ bismuth crystals – a lightly radioactive and highly diamagnetic element often historically mistaken for the ‘philosophers stone’ in alchemy.
A pool of polluted water from the River Lea contains a water feature modelled on the outlet pipes that pump toxic rare earth minerals into Lake Bautou in Mongolia – waste products from the manufacturing of a vast array of technological devices from smartphones to wind turbines. This water circulates through the space casting a magic circle to be entered. Emerging from the ruins of this toxic ecotastrophe, signs of new and persistent life and delicate organic material are beginning to emerge and human and non-humans thrive despite the destruction.
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List of works:
Maggie Roberts aka Mer, MIASMA, 2018, single screen HD video 16:13
Contributions by 0rphan Drift collaborators > Lidar Scans: Jason Stapleton/Lightfarm // DeepDream coding: Michael Vertolli // datamoshing: Lendl Barcelos // Swamp Demon: Joseph Walsh // field recordings: David van Rensburg // commissioned audio section: Justin Allart // The Keening: Lliezel Ellick, Rosemary Lombard and Roxanne de Freitas
Ayesha Tan Jones Psychic Excavations: The Parasites of Pangu 2018. Mixed media incl plaster, wooden branches, inflatable birthing pool, transferable tattoos, bird’s nest, copper wires, electronic wires, amethyst, bismuth, shungite, moss, black mirrors, iphone screens, circuit boards, iphone insides, wax, water from River Lea oil spill, black obsidian foraged from Obsidian Butte California, quartz crystals, faux hair, witch fingers, carbon tracing tattoo paper, minerals from a geyser in Iceland, stone from white cliffs of Beachy Head, mugwort, thyme, marigold, lavender and rosemary.
Artist bios:
Maggie Roberts (London, UK & Capetown, ZA) is member of the hive mind media project 0rphan Drift. The work of Roberts (aka Mer) is science fictional and immersive. It complicates the distinctions between material and immaterial phenomena and dimensions, both in content and media. The work uses digital formats – video, animation and photoshop – fused with watercolour, photographic collage, oil paint and sheen mediums. It coalesces out of an often intricate remixing process, onto paper, canvas and video screen. Roberts is currently Research Fellow at Goldsmiths University London. www.orphandriftarchive.com
Ayesha Tan Jones (b.1993, London, UK). Exploring energy, form and identity of the ‘Femxle Spiritual’, Tan Jones places this archetypical figure at the centre of a radiant and humming cosmic world view. Pop music, sculpture, digital image and video mix collage manipulation are combined to express a political consciousness traversing the universe on a quest for adventure. In June 2016, Tan Jones was awarded the Yorkshire Sculpture Park’s graduate residency, giving them space and materials to research and make work on the grounds. This culminated with a show in March 2017. www.ayeshatanjones.com
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Alembic is a programme of three intergenerational duo exhibitions, a publication, events and online commission. It brings together new commissions by Annabelle Craven-Jones, Elizabeth Mputu, Ayesha Tan Jones and Maggie Roberts, developed in connection to cyberfeminist materials from the media art library of curator Kathy Rae Huffman. These new commissions are exhibited alongside significant historical works by artists Faith Wilding and Shu Lea Cheang brought to the UK for the first time, forming a scope of works spanning from 1969 to the contemporary. Alembic celebrates the shared affinity across these generations, where the continual critique and transformation of the political biases of networked communication is practiced through multiple feminisms and strategies of queering technology.
Unfolding how the materiality of the body (recognising agency and affect beyond the human) becomes a site for digital and alchemical transmutation, Alembic takes its name from a form of alchemical beaker[2]. The process of distilling chemicals between two beakers connected by a tube, mirrors the pipelines of digital communication technology, where transmission of data constitutes an abstraction. Considering the body as alchemical vessel, it contains the processes of mutation: virus, hacking, healing and encoding. Mythologies emerge through these processes of alterity, as part of a greater cosmological and ecological network of co-dependencies.
Further activities in Alembic:
Alembic III: Shu Lea Cheang & Annabelle Craven-Jones, 11 May-16 June (pv Thu 10 May)
A resulting publication will be launched later in 2018.
Alembic is co-curated by Sarah Jury, Helen Kaplinsky and Lucy A. Sames. For further information: contact@beingres.org www.beingres.org
Supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England
Image: Ayesha Tan Jones, Whychcraft? (detail), Yorkshire Sculpture Park, 2017