Our world can be characterised as being in a state of coming undone. A state of barely together almost falling apartness. The very architecture of our existence is unknowably complex and inherently unsound. We individually and collectively bind it together - but only just. Our environment and lives are at once rich with possibility and riddled with risk. Always in the making and being unmade - incrementally or catastrophically - the world we create and occupy embodies a flux of incompleteness and change.
In these moments of coming undone we simultaneously glimpse disintegration and the possibilities of remaking ourselves. Therein lies the potential for making art and for engaging the world that intersects with it. Each of the distinctly different artists featured in Persuasion Equation operate in the resonant, absorbing and perplexing interstitices between everyday life and the discourses of art.
Using a large brush and ink on paper Matthew Hunt attempts to trace and plot the 'floaters' in his eyes. Rendered in broad brush strokes Pure Momentary Glimpses captures Hunt's fleeting, ever shifting, optically unique and imperfect perspective of the world within the apparatus of his own eye. In the blurry flash of a stray particle Hunt registers the mechanics and action of looking and translates it into imagery. Akira Akira's sculptural configurations suspend the viewer in an uncertain stasis. Titled Production Still this work plays on states of stability and brings to mind questions of balance, geometry and materiality. Presented on an Ikea table, Akira's enigmatic tableau unites disparate appropriated objects, shapes and forms (such as a geodesic sphere associated with 20th century social utopianism) that speak of the ambitions and failures of modernism. In this piece Akira draws together the poetry of the everyday with a concern for physics.
Meticulous, intricate actions and processes based on assembly, disassembly and reconstruction animate Chris Bond's work. In Plastic Limb a single eucalypt branch has neatly been cut into pieces and laid out, the ends of each segment finely painted with colour stripes. Thus reconstituted the branch now embodies the qualities of both naturalism and contrivance, of realism and simulation. Huseyin Sami's installation Chandelier (Linden) is a peculiarly hybrid object which is at once organic and awkwardly geometrical. While recalling exquisite and grandiose chandeliers and more recently Alexander Calder's elegantly articulated mobiles, Sami's sculptural form hangs almost limply. Its manufacture suggests a homely, therapeutic arts and crafts aesthetic that contrasts with the status and values of its historical antecedents.
An ambiguous melancholy pervades Catherine Bell's work "I'll huff and I'll puff and I'll blow your house down". Displayed on a digital picture frame Bell's strangely allusive and slightly disorienting images combine in sequence to form a type of animation depicting unknown, monumental buildings and mysterious urban sites. As we watch these simple fragile structures (made from talcum powder) erode, they evocatively register the passage of time and echo the impermanence of our constructed environment.
Despite the persistent presence of crumbling symbols and broken icons, coming undone is not about heroically looking into the epochal abyss - instead it implies an everyday consciousness, offering pause, reflection and perhaps even encouragement for us to keep it together.
Melissa Keys
