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The real world is only one of the many possibilities that can be moved back and forth; the game would remain incomplete if one were to accept reality as a finished product. That is why objects are stretched and shortened, make-believe objects are sprinkled among the existing ones, and miraculous apparitions are created without hesitation.

     Siegfried Kracauer, Calico-World (1926)

 

Glittering worlds of crystal, drifting pastel dreamscapes, chiaroscuro nightmares, vibrating perspectives. The use of concrete, wax, willow, amethyst, rose quartz, snowflake obsidian, shells, copper, pine, polycarbonate, Perspex, canvas, chalk, charcoal, pencil, tea, calico, pigment, plywood. Terraforms brings together a group of artists and performers whose works conjure off-kilter spaces and sounds that suggest arcane kingdoms and parallel realities. Throughout the exhibition familiar reference points help to orientate us to our surroundings - architectural forms, glimpses of the natural world - a leaf here, a staircase there. But look closely and the stairs are inverted, the leaf just an outline. These figurative touchstones are in the process of disappearing becoming ghostly apparitions half seen through a smudged surface, some blurred pigment, seeping through oil soaked paper. Images and half completed sculptural forms are there but not there, here but not quite here. They speak of spaces under construction, of archaeological remnants from forgotten cultures, of the transfer of one world into another, of spaces once inhabited, of spaces waiting to be occupied.

 

What we thought was fixed reveals itself to be unstable. All that is solid melts into air. Climate change and resource depletion provoke colonial fantasies of lighting out for new territories, of shaping new worlds in the image of the old.

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