Snakeskin Lattice

Rachel Garrard

Patrick Meagher

Caleb Nussear

Devin Powers

Daniel Subkoff

Panos Tsagaris

Michael Woody

The School of Visual Art’s CP Projects Space is pleased to present an exploration of mind and matter, curated by Lalita Salander.

Finding methods to represent what may exist beyond the scope of our five sense perceptions has been a perennial fixation for artists throughout history. Whether responding to socially determined religious myths, expressing more personal revelations and visions or attempting to transmute the immaterial to a material form, the fabrication of artwork has often been used as an exercise of mind over matter.

In our contemporary context, as we spend most of our time gazing through the hyperreal screen of the internet, our collective sensibility of tangible and intangible reality has been correspondingly morphed. While we may be comfortable interacting in increasingly intangible ways across often great distances, there is a latent materialism at the basis of the technologies making this possible. At the same time (and without technological aid) multitudes of people across the world have premonitory dreams that come to pass, receive phone calls from someone they were concurrently thinking of or have memories and associations arise that they attribute to previous lives. And during the course of one day over 150,000 people leave corpses behind as they die, like hermit crabs discarding inanimate shells. From a wider temporal vantage nothing would appear tangible—mind or matter—as everything exists in perpetual flux.

The group of artists represented in this exhibition share an engaged interest in exploring the hidden or intangible qualities of natural phenomenon that materialist theory and technological developments have not brought us closer to deciphering.