A Consciousness Harnessed to Flesh, by D Contemporary
D Contemporary is pleased to announce, ‘A Consciousness Harnessed to Flesh’, a group show featuring works of Adam Boyd, Irena Posner, Pia Ortuno and Preslav Kostov.Driven by Susan Sontag’s quotidian notes documenting the evolution of an extraordinary mind, the exhibition brings together a group of artists presenting works that navigate dimensions of time, ritualistic repetition, showcasing tropes and turn innate textures into supernatural imagery.Notes collected into a very truthful picture coming from our inner self completing a worldview that reflects the nowness. Narratives of time and archetypes reflected on harrowing futurism, embedded in the present, harnessing a fraction of the maker's mind to reveal what lies beneath. Transforming materiality, bodies becoming one with abyssal voids, instilling energy, searching for an environment of non-possession.
In an ensemble of painting, sculpture and installation, Pia Ortuno navigates dimensions of time, the possibilities in ritualistic repetition and the aesthetics of spirituality. Her work echoes post-colonial religious aesthetics as well as pre-columbian rituals and bridges these conversations with those of material exploration. Drawn to quasi-ecclesiastic, supernatural imagery, Adam Boyd works are an alignment of traditional felting and quilting, with 3D-printing and lidar-scanning technology. Researching pop cultural & art historical content which, in turn, harbour traces of much wider philosophical and scientific debate, he aims to situate his practice as a syncretic testbed, where ideas and processes coexist and cross-pollinate.
Irena Posner’s installation turns the vitrine and the space around the window of the gallery into a vivarium, consisting of woodland mulch, fluorescent lamps, and hand carved marble reptiles. ‘The young and the restless’, a riff on a soap opera, uses the artificial environment as a metaphor for states of displacement and non-belonging. The stone iguana perched under a lamp, unable to regulate its body temperature, derives warmth by affixing itself to an opposite surface and basking under infrared light in the hope of mobilising her body into action. Taking further the essence of bodily representation, Preslav Kostov’s imposing compositions of carnal imagery echoes the forms and palette of old masters presenting Ghosts, searching for an environment of non-possession. Tangled forms with alluring asymmetry forge a feeling of melancholic isolation emerging from a metaphysical void.
VISITING INFO:GALLERY NAME: D ContemporaryADDRESS: 23 Grafton Street, London, England, W1S 4EYAREA OF LONDON: MayfairFINAL DAY: 18th February 2023ENTRY: Free