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With: David Saunders, Geoffrey Smedley, Jean Spencer, Jeffrey Steele, John Ernest, Michael Kidner
MATRIX exhibition/11 June – 8 July
An exhibition by 12 artists whose work is based upon rationalistic premises, artists who have a particular interest in and concern for conceptual generative systems both in visual art and in other creative disciplines such as music, mathematics, linguistics etc. The artists taking part in this exhibition are Richard Allen/John Ernest/Malcolm Hughes/Colin Jones/ Michael Kidner/Peter Lowe/James Moves/David Saunders/ Geoffrey Smedley/Jean Spencer/Jeffrey Steele/Gillian Wise. Seven of the artists exhibiting were included in Systeemi, an exhibition of syntactic art from Britain at the Amos Andersons Konstmuseum, Helsinki, Finland 1969.
“A matrix is a new symbol for an entity of a new kind and one of a very wide scope” RGD Alien, Basic Mathematics, Macmillan 1965.
To simply say that this is an exhibition of current works by 12 artists who share a common interest in systemic procedures is too broad a categorisation since systems have been used in a variety of ways by artists of many different kinds. Order can be established, but also systematically disrupted by these means. Developing linguistic and semiotic theories reveal many ways in which information is conveyed by means of organised structures. To be sure, most of the exhibitors are interested in systems in this general sense but in their works the information has to do with structure itself. News is generated by the articulation of similarities and differences in quantity, location, orientation and colour but the “message”, if the word remains appropriate, is a syntactic rather than a semantic one.