One Size Fits All : Jack Brindley & Inma Femenía
THE RYDER PROJECTS
19a Herald StreetLondon E2 6JT
25 February 2016 - 2 April 2016 Wed - Sat, 12 - 6pm Private view: Wednesday 24, 6pm http://www.theryderprojects.com/one-size-fits-all.html
The RYDER is pleased to present One Size Fits All, an exhibition of new work by artists Jack Brindley and Inma Femenía. Conceived as a dialogue between the two artists’ practices, the exhibition looks at the ways in which industrial modes of production can be perverted, and brings the hidden ideology of the digital sphere into material reality. The two artists draw our attention to how standardised approaches structure and define the world around us – by forcing us to experience this concept in its physicality. Jack Brindley’s installation is composed of handrails and resin poles distributed throughout the gallery space. These vertical floor to ceiling bars force the visitor to negotiate their way through the space in a way that is distinctly unnatural, drawing comparisons to the digital shepherding of individuals throughout the internet. Each pole contains a set of letters embedded in the resin and caught in plumes of black and white pigment. Retrieved from Captcha - the computer automated security test that draws together random collections of words to verify if the user is human - these random selections of letters which restrict our navigation through digital space are here presented as a form of concrete poetry. Engaging with another aspect of the digital, and its translation to physicality, Inma Femenía’s ’70 Evidences’ explores the translation of the electronic to the printed image. The work is composed of seventy A4 black printed papers forming a grid upon the wall. Through a rigid scientific process of printing the same apparently fixed colour in seventy different printing houses, the artist highlights the elusive quality of the official and seemingly graspable, as the wall reveals 70 ‘shades of black’. If Jack Brindley’s use of Captcha points at the abstraction and uniformity of digital language, Inma Femenía’s tones of black highlight the unavoidable subjectivity of this language when transferred to material forms. Our limited perception of the digital is further explored by Femenía’s series ‘Graded Metals’. Through image-processing softwares, linear gradients are printed onto metal surfaces to simulate the colour spectrum of the material properties. Following the UV printing process, each panel is further contorted and folded into shapes that seem to claim their status as objects, despite their abstract beginnings. The universal language of Ikea’s assembly diagrams is the starting point for Jack Brindley’s ‘Instructions for Living and Building’ drawings. Using blue carbon paper to render Ikea’s schematic directions indecipherable Brindley invites us to think about how our lives are shaped by the mass designed artefacts that surround us, and questions the place of the individual within standardised modes of production.