Viewing Room
Curated by Bob Bicknell-Knight
Bob Bicknell-Knight, Johanna Flato, Roxman Gatt and Rosa-Maria Nuutinen
5th – 20th October 2019
Harlesden High Street, 60-70 Shorts Gardens, London, WC2H 9AH, UK
Harlesden High Street is pleased to present Viewing Room, a group exhibition of works from artists that Harlesden High Street has previously worked with and will work with in the near future. The show includes work from Bob Bicknell-Knight, Johanna Flato, Roxman Gatt and Rosa-Maria Nuutinen, curated by Bob Bicknell-Knight.
The exhibition features work from four artists, from cattle prods to paintings, concerning broad ideas surrounding digital territories, public vs private personas, macho cultures and future beings. Both conceptual and visual connections connect the artworks, from disconnected car parts to tech CEOs. Primarily the artworks are critiquing and commenting on the consumer culture that we as a Western society have created and contributed to.
Bob Bicknell-Knight’s Mark’s Third (2019) is part of a series of recent paintings looking into the psyche and moral compass of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Within the works Zuckerberg is portrayed as a trophy hunter, individuals who hunt wild game for recreational purposes. In a recent interview with Rolling Stone, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey stated that there was a year when Zuckerberg was only eating what he was killing and had a penchant for goat meat. Supposedly he would stun goats with a taser, cut their throat with a knife and have their bodies sent to a butcher to prepare. Being served goat for dinner whilst attending a dinner party at Zuckerberg’s house was Dorsey’s most memorable encounter with Zuckerberg. The new paintings imagine that Zuckerberg took this interest in animal killing further, becoming a trophy hunter. At the end of a successful hunt, the hunter will usually pose next to the slain animal for a photograph, to be distributed to friends and family members.
Other paintings in the exhibition, Empty Machines (2019) and Larkspur (2019), are part of a recent series of paintings that begin as in game photographs within the video game Horizon Zero Dawn. The 2017 video game follows Aloy, a hunter in the year 3040, who inhabits a future Earth that has limited access to technology and has become overrun by animal like machines controlled by a rogue artificial intelligence. The work depicts abandoned, long forgotten cars that have become monuments to virtual users who would have previously inhabited them within the digital space, alongside flowers at various times of the in-game day.
Johanna Flato’s X Asset (2019) and .IO Asset (2019) are embedded within a tangle of cables within the viewing room, manifesting as two electric cattle branding irons glowing with emitted heat, depicting an ‘X’ and a ‘.IO’. Drawn from a series titled Assets, these tools-as-artworks link logos and symbols back to their physical origin of branding something living as bounded property.
The ‘X’ symbol was chosen for its associations of spatial claiming: a variable to be solved for, a box checked, coordinates marked. The ‘.IO’, meanwhile, was chosen for its colliding symbolisms in computer science and geopolitics. ‘.io’ is a top-level domain (TLD) popular in the tech startup community for its ‘input/output’ (I/O) associations. However, as a country-code, TLD, it stands for the British Indian Ocean Territory, a highly restricted site in the Chagos Archipelago that saw thousands of local Chagossians illegally evicted in the late 1960s to make way for a joint UK-US military base still operating today. As a work, ‘.IO Asset’ suggests that these violent, imperialistic exertions of dominion underpin shiny, purportedly neutral web domains.
In a site-specific iteration of this series, one wall has been branded with the X Asset brand.
Roxman Gatt’s work features throughout the space, You’re my Perfiction (2018), Defender/Protector (2018) and CTRL Me (2018) are all made from car body parts. Found objects and carefully constructed duplicates associated with consumerism and car culture are deconstructed, repurposed and reassembled within the works. In the work Defender/Protector expressions such as ‘letting go’ and ‘giving up’ are emblazoned onto the straps of a sports car harness. These straps suspend a grey painting, abstracting and undermining these objects of protection and strength. CTRL Me (2018) features a number of wax gear sticks, old and decrepit, placed on the floor in a huddle, becoming stand ins for physical bodies within the gallery space.
Rosa-Maria Nuutinen’s The Bird (2019) is a recent drawing depicting the skeleton of a defeathered cyborg bird, ready to be taxidermied, becoming an artefact of the not so distant future, commenting upon the augmentation and cyborgization of human beings within society.
BOB BICKNELL-KNIGHT 