Wintermute
“Wintermute was hive mind, decision maker, effecting change in the world outside.”
The title Wintermute is taken from William Gibson’s 1984 novel Neuromancer. Gibson’s artificial intelligence Winter- mute is struggling to free itself from the digital world into the analogue. Wintermute’s understanding of this world might be artificial, but its longing for this understanding is purely existential.
Wintermute connects the work of six international, multi- media artists. Their work stands out in this fast-paced digital world, due to a mixture of sentiment and ambiguity in both subject matter and materiality.
Adriano Amaral’s (1982, Ribeirão Preto, BR) delicate installations are grounded in the interpolation of layers, elements and moments of both experience and represen- tation. Matter, gesture and image are rendered as intimate categories to be purposed in personal ways, and distinct procedures of ‘making’ are shuffled together, in order to prompt different courses for association. Adriano Amaral is represented by Múrias Centeno, Portugal.
Alex Dordoy (1985, Newcastle, UK) is fascinated by ‘the disconnect’ between the physical and the virtual, the real and the what-could-have-been. Dordoy edits and manipulates existing objects, photographs, images and patterns using photoshop after which he develops them into paintings or sculptures in plaster, silicone or jesmo- nite. He explores how objects can invoke associations at different times and in different contexts, thereby acquiring a new meaning. Alex is presenting an installation with four small paintings of hummingbirds. The birds are depicted upside down, as if they are falling. Each bird is the same size and shape, though their colors and the design of the background change. In the words of Dordoy ‘the birds are little ciphers for humans: each one different, all the same, beautiful, hopeful, lost’. Alex Dordoy is represented by The Modern Institute, Glasgow and GRIMM, Amsterdam.
Alicja Kwade’s (1979, Katowice, PL) varied practice tries to unveil mental perceptions and physical experiences of how the body inhabits space and time. Captivated by scientific problems and visual experiments, she manipu- lates objects, processes and concepts translating them into artistic values. Her work embraces and questions physics, engages the viewer and plays with the outcome of this rich encounter, while also questioning deep- seated social conventions.
In a display case, Fahhrad (Bicycle), labeled glass jars with pulverized contents are presented. Kwade had a bicycle separated into component parts and then profes- sionally pulverized in a lengthy process. The ground components with a particle size of 0.5 mm, the size of a grain of sand, were poured into the various glass jars. Precise specifications of the weight and contents of the itemized materials trace the industrial product back to its original materiality. With this installation, Kwade presents an image of a ‘decomposing material world.’ Alicja Kwade is represented by König, Berlin and 303 Gal- lery, New York.