UNCERTAIN ORDER
20 March – 6 April 2013
Camila Galaz + Yuna Chun
Uncertain Order brings together Camila Galaz and Yuna Chun in an exhibition that demonstrates their inability to create perfect order despite the determination to do so.
IMAGES |Yuna Chun, Untitled Life, 2012, acrylic, oil, pencil, wood on panel, 55 x 60cm, Camila Galaz + Yuna Chun, Camila Galaz, Keeping Cavities Clean, 2013, acrylic, pencil, wood panels. 50 x 45 cm | Images courtesy of the artist.
UNCERTAIN ORDER
All language structures eventually find a space where they fail to communicate what they were invented for and become secondary to the sensation of unique experience.
Whether in art or social groupings of class, economic constructs and models, scientific explanations of logical process, political argument, religion, family or historical paradigms eventually what needs to be said by someone to someone else finds itself in a position where the difficulty of adequate expression makes for a certain strangeness and surreal layering of possible interpretations. The physical nature of the world becomes important. How we experience light and structure and invent memories morphs what we expect to be viewing or interacting with into an alternative communication of invented or inverted reality.
The work of both Camila Galaz and Yuna Chun explore the limitations of the idea that the use of logic results in a language of order that explains the world around us directly.
Galaz’s paintings refer, it seems at first view, to ancient types of engineering or scientific diagrammatical textbook drawings but without the key to the colours or labels they lose their original usefulness. The internal structure of the paintings lack determining signifiers so they may refer to things atomic or cosmological.
Abstraction is the subject of Galaz’s works. The paintings seem to suggest that the historical abstract visual language they reference is like the textbook drawings used as source material and belong in the past. They suggest an ironic and anarchic put-down of everything that is understood to be true in an ordered, logical and agreed upon common history of abstract painting. Considering the technical drawing references they are sourced from, the evidence of the human hand in their making is piquant.
Chun’s exploration of travel as a means of interpreting feelings and distance between people, primarily her own family, acts as a metaphor for language also. That is what language does - it connects people and makes sense of distance. Again there comes a time when language structure itself is all that is left of sensation. Travel anywhere for a while and the images of the road, the airport or the bus stop becomes the primary structural connective tissue between invented and real memories. It becomes impossible to think of friends and family without the punctuation of the physical drain of travel itself. The language developed by the sensation of travel both distances and unites the desires for closeness and independence.
The theme that underpins this exhibition is the difficulty that all language systems have in defining anything adequately because they have a tendency to simplify reality into a necessarily limited and ultimately fallible notion of order. Perhaps art may be seen as an open-ended journey from which the only logical conclusion is that we can never accurately explain our sensation of living to someone else completely.
The exhibition suggests the language structures we invent so that we may order our sensations into memories will succeed as communication tools for a while but cannot overcome the inevitable rot of entropy that is inevitably present in those structures. Order will become disorder and that in itself will become a new model for communication. Viva entropy!
- Phil Edwards