Yellowed Minds at c-o-m-p-o-s-i-t-e

Artists: Fleur Melbourn, Laura O’Neill, Natalie Price Hafslund

Exhibition title: Yellowed Minds

Venue: c-o-m-p-o-s-i-t-e, Brussels, Belgium

Date: June 09 – July 16, 2016

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artists and c-o-m-p-o-s-i-t-e

For Yellowed Minds, three young British artists Fleur Melbourn, Laura O’Neill, and Natalie Price Hafslund developed new works, both individual and collaborative. The exhibition emerged from a continuous and intricate exchange between the artists, as well as between the artists and c-o-m-p-o-s-i-t-e. Individual works act as vehicles to the collaborative works. The result is an immersive show in vinyl, animation, video, sculpture, poetry and painting – convoluted, with varying degrees of viscosity in sound, image and im/materiality. It presents us with an obscure account of “where we are right now in the world.”

Digitally sculpted frogspawn presages what will be entered. Single units scattered over screen-tacky substance. It reminds us that nowadays life is rendered; every aspect of nature is drafted and crafted on some computer. A render is an epistemic enquiry that lacks completeness, un/folding in un/charted directions. As we are. Becoming-tadpole, but for now – in this stage of development – black dots in grey blobs. No lines of connection, but held in jelly. Touch without touching, rather self-touching bound in relationships of reciprocal reference.

Inside, there are many inners. Ubiquitous digital bowels are reconfiguring human wiring. In these dark depths we are ill-equipped. Visceral perception is complicated matter, and visceral geography is one of baroque complexity. Poor receptors make for poor articulations; whatever’s swallowed is hard to locate. Things pop up here, then there. We need externalized retinae to extend the sensitivity of our limited sensory range. We need renders.

And oracles, too. Future predictions still hold sway (as they always have). Considerable effort is put into cal- and qualculating, re-reading and re-writing, with manifold inscriptions. Alignment seems necessary for some and all of us. Turbulence, fluctuations, bifurcations and the like are computational problems to be dealt with.

Oracles aren’t born any more. Today they are made. They’re made by merging distributed data and resources into polymorphous figures. As they aren’t born, they don’t die either. They’re just reborn, by regurgitating themsleves, to enter into a next level of circulation.

Just like in a video game. Just like the Greek gods. Or just like Louis the cat. As s/he descents into the pelagic zones of the human condition, s/he comments on the things s/he has seen. And they are not pretty. Will s/he, in some final stage of this anthropo-zoo-tropic voyage, crawl up Hades’ rear end to witness the death of the aliens? Only they know.

Good company often omits that it’s actually not the best one around, whereas bad friends are friends too. Like sweaty ghosts that are happy for their late lover to meet someone else, but nevertheless staying around to watch. Like confrontational nastiness, messiness, instability, digital intestinal flora, … Perhaps these friends are friends to be nurtured.

For now, for us, it goes on. Confronting and shaping things to come. An underwater opera could be a wondrous performative essay of speculation. Set against a seemingly generic décor, yet one in which the ‘invisible’ surroundings become palpably present. Dressed in generic costumes. No heroes but upscaled losers. Together, in a collective state of submergence, where experience and dexterity is altered due to unpredictable movement, how to feed on the jelly to become-tadpole?