Flatlands

Curated by Rachal Bradley & Inka Meißner

In a world of Image how do we ‘look’? In this exhibition Bradley and Meißner propose looking as a set of social and material relations, that in fact can be understood as a spatial experience. It is within the movement from figurative to abstraction that painting can hold the surface as a potential for spatial vision. In bringing together these specific works, the artists attempt to adumbrate this topology from the figurative to abstract and somewhere in between, capturing this spatiality and very contemporary way of seeing.

The exhibition draws on two ideas; first, the emotive relation that is conjured between the very movement from minor to major chords in music, as a vertically organized form of changing the register while moving horizontally. Second a scenery set in the Edwin Abbott Abbott’s 1884 novella Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions. The story depicts separate worlds of 1, 2 and 3 dimensions only. In the world of 2 dimensions, Flatland, the sentient inhabitants, flat shapes (our protagonist is called Square) can only move along the plane unaware there is another world of entirely spatial movement in the 3-dimensional Spaceland above while below rests a world of 1-dimensions (Lineland). The book was intended as a social satire of Victorian society’s rigid norms, but points to how perception of material relations (here dimensions) informs self-perception and behavioural understanding. As such painting can return as crucial intelligence on how to rechallenge the flattening structures and processes organizing our lives.