NYAB Event - “The Weird Show” Exhibition

“The Weird Show” Exhibition

Canada

This event has ended.

This three-person crew of Weird art makers collectively toys with the structures of consciousness, the perception of time and space and the central structure of an experience and its intentionality. With each piece, the Weird show integrates the realm of human thought and experience, examining what can not be physically measured. This is a collection of works each evoking the unearthly and the uncanny in different ways.

Willy Le Maitre encourages 3-dimensional thinking with the vivid quality of snapshots as a means to change the conception of time and space. He investigates the phenomenology of seeing; looking at how images of the seen are blended with those that the mind recalls.The images are connected by association. One is taken from a repository of captured photos and combined with another. The images interact in the picture’s composition with an instability that resembles a passing moment. They become something indistinct- a meshing of the seen and the recalled image.

Agathe Snow introduces narratives of environmental collapse, accumulation and accretion with a playful series of sculptures that hang on the wall. The two-dimensional wall works manipulate our perceptions- laden with consumer objects they float in an unexpected and upside down world. Snow creates her own universe that is governed by its distinct set of rules. There is a weird sense of time. The past and future are jumbled together into a non-linear evolution.

Peter Coffin’s large wooden hand suggests a sphere and is completed by the bubble windshield of a Bell 47 helicopter- the same helicopter hanging in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It’s inventor Arthur M Young was a philosopher, physicist, and mystic who created the institute for the study of Consciousness in the same neighborhood of Berkeley, where Coffin grew up. Arthur called the helicopter his “Psycopter” because he believed that when people would move through its space they would change the conception of time and space. Without this “Psycopter” man would maintain a kind of “flat lands” reality that discourages 3 dimensional thinking and spatialization. Coffin employs the realm of time in his volcano piece, a model of a volcano that makes a smoke circle each minute. Volcanos are known to make perfect smoke circles just as dolphins make perfect air bubbles. Bubble rings and smoke rings are both examples of vortex rings. The syncopated rhythm of the smoke becomes a physical measure of time.

Scientists can’t be sure what the shape of space-time is, but most likely, its flat (as opposed to spherical or even donut-shaped) and stretches out infinitely. If space-time goes on forever, then it must start repeating at some point. So if you look far enough, you would encounter another version of yourself- in fact, infinite versions of yourself. Some of these twins will be doing exactly what you’re doing right now, while other will have worn a different sweater this morning and still others will have a vastly different life experience. A performance during the opening of the Weird show examines this conception of space-time.