Artist: Peter Coffin
Exhibition Title: Fjord bank glyphs quiz vext Cwm
Date: June 6 – July 12, 2015
Full gallery of images, press release and link available after the jump.
Images:
Images courtesy of Herald St, London
Press Release:
Shifting between modes of perception, to experience a galaxy of fruit, a re-construction of a picnic scene and found abstractions that reveal themselves in a page of text, Peter Coffin’s exhibition explores the ways in which we look at reality and the positions from which we do this.
In Untitled, X-ray scans of fruit are animated to fly at, through and past the viewer in slow motion, appearing simultaneously as objects in space and as particles viewed under a microscope. The continual emergence of colour-saturated forms against the black void, suggest a hyper-real yet impossible perspective of infinity made up of the glowing particles of each of the fruit’s semi-transparent volumes.
In the space curtained off behind the projection, themes of time and space are extended to the material and the textual. The work situated on the floor, Untitled (Powers of Ten), is a re-construction of the picnic scene from a 1977 science film by the same name. The relaxed picnic setting includes food and wine, science journals and a book about time and space that presumably inspire the dream sequence of the film. With the tangible absence of the subjects in Coffin’s re-creation, the work invites the viewer to imagine him or herself within this setting, in the state of mind the scene suggests and in a position from which to engage an imagination and experience of the macrocosm, the microcosm and everything in between.
Continuing these relationships is the piece Untitled Rivers (Time and the Probabilistic View of the World). A page taken from one of the books in the picnic scene is scanned, enlarged and printed onto canvas and in turn marked by floating lines of colour that both obstruct and highlight the abstract forms that reveal themselves out of the page of text. Painted in the spaces between the words, the lines disrupt the viewers potential to read the page’s text as if ‘against interpretation’, proposing an intuitive and imaginary reading of its surface and the abstract shapes it invokes. It is through these works and their different iterations that Peter Coffin suggests the literal and the abstract ways we see and understand the world and our position within this vast constellation.
