DYNAMICS OF EXTREMELY HIGH ENTROPY

DYNAMICS OF EXTREMELY HIGH ENTROPY is an exhibition featuring works by Maria Joranko, Michael Lye and Ian Margo, curated by COMEDY OF MENACE and shown at Nguyen Wahed, London. The title, derived from the script of GATE-1, a “video-archive” by Margo, serendipitously serves as a fitting inquiry into the practices of all three artists. Works on display circle around entropy, machinic viscerality and mutation, undercutting essentialisms and instead reaching towards becomings characterized by radical change. It’s what Mark Fisher called the gothic flatline: where it is no longer possible to differentiate the animate from the inanimate and where to have agency is not necessarily to be alive. This anorganic life: technics and materials re-combining and mutating with no final end-point - haunts the “human” subject with a “life” of its own, unfolding and changing in ways out of reach to "us." In GATE-1, a “potential organism” emerges within a digital sphere, writhing alively and jaggedly glitching, as a voice-over equally theory and prose poem describes its oscillating, unstable and visceral process of emergence into systems of signification. In Lye’s works, patinated steel surfaces and black-painted timber planks are re-arranged throughout the exhibition period, re-negotiating their formal aspects and re-inscribing themselves on the layout of the space itself. And in Joranko’s works, gothic aesthetics and subjects, especially the vampire, combine with industrial materials and techniques in sculptures that present cold precision, chaotic disruption and new forms of anorganic inspired vitality.