Command Lines, Void Gallery, Northern Ireland, June- Aug 2019
Photos Tansy Cowley and Void Gallery.
Breaking the Unreasonable Silence is a game interface. Players ask a question to generate a unique sequence from 78 animations. 4 card spread:
The project followed a research residency at the Warburg Institute London exploring tarot's cultural heritage and the mutation of symbols. Tarot originated as a 15th century card game with the illustrations designed as a procession of Christian enlightenment. As time passed their meaning was altered by readers who reworked the illustrations to add more potency to their varying spiritual agendas. They still have a hold over those of us who endlessly hope and search for more control and more understanding of how we should be in the world. I re-imagine the iconic tarot as a three-dimensional experiment in symbolism, action, story-telling and magical thinking. The term Command Lines frames the work, insinuating systems, networks and feedback loops, control over and order of information. The twenty-two major arcana Tarot cards, first created through the live performance (Lessness, still quorum) then documented as animation now acts as both a memory and a catalyst. An interactive ‘game’, answers the viewer’s questions with a series of animations and spoken vignettes. Sculptural forms and symbols are echoed in different scales and media, shifting their meaning, rendered in sweet gradients of yellow, pinks and greens and embroidered, painted onto clay and fabricated in Jesmonite, resin or cardboard.Other sculptures oscillate between conduits for practicing meditative rituals (such as a clay bell idol or prayer cushion) and ciphers (such as the floral wreath) so that accessing and sharing knowledge is both more open and more secret at the same time.
related works:
Research residency at The Warburg Institute 2017-2019
Lotus, Bosse and Baum 2017
Lessness, still quorum, performance, Serpentine Galleries, Sept 2018
APA performance fair, Brussels, 2018
New Work, Exposed Arts Projects, Nov 2018
Unreasonable Silence ( tarot cards), common-editions, April 2019
Lotus, Bosse and Baum 2017
photos Damian Griffiths