THE SKY IS FALLING
CCA: Centre for Contemporary Arts,
Glasgow UK, Apr. 2017
The Sky is Falling is an exhibition, event programme and symposium that presents disparate visual imaginaries, looking at how we organise ourselves in some of the most challenging cities in our world. Exploring human desire and the promise of utopia, it contrasts the perspective of the city from above as envisaged by the modern planner, with the moveable, unfixed reality of living in urban space, and the contradictory senses of dubiousness and hope that we might feel as the sky appears to fall.
Group Show:
Black Audio Film Collective, Laura Oldfield Ford, Clara Ianni, Dora Mejía and Carol Rhodes.
Curators:
Ainslie Roddick
Remco de Blaaij
Clara Ianni, Free Form, video, 7 mins 14 sec, loop, 2013.
Clara Ianni, Class Drawings, framed prints, 2017.
Carol Rhodes, River, Roads, oil on board, 50 x 57 cm, 2013.
Dora Mejía, The Garden of Eden, mixed media, satellite photogra-phy, 98 colour prints on satin, 62 x 62 cm, variable dimensions,
2014, Laura Oldfield Ford, Radiant Futures, sound and mixed
media, 2017. Dora Mejía, Wandering Stars, paint on wall and floor, 10 x 1.50 m, 2017, Carol Rhodes, River, Roads, drawings, variable dimensions and dates. Carol Rhodes, Roads, Buildings (evening),
oil on board, 51 x 53.5 cm, 2013, Courtesy of Toby Treves.
Black Audio Film Collective, Twilight City, Dir. Reece Auguiste, 52 mins, loop, 1989.
Photography by Alan Dimmick
Dora Mejía’s practice is entirely invested in under-standing urban space and how we navigate the city through different perspectives and subjective responses. As arts-chitect, the city of Medellin is her subject as she uses the history of the city and access to it, as a starting point for her works.
The Garden of Eden is a grid compiled of 98 squa-re cushions. It alludes to a time where means of geographic information allow us to appreciate the flourishing of human civilizations and settlements, in which 'modern people’' still inhabit the same land of the mythical origins that bathed the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.
The satellite images evoke the experience of a dream enchanted garden from the immaterial perspective of the most sophisticated digital technology, capturing satellite images from outer space. Dora Mejía asks what has become of humanity that has unleashed dark sins, clouding the modern Baghdad or New York and over-shadowing a once splendid Garden.
Mejía’s Wandering Stars explores a great paradox of the civilized world in which, more and more, city lights prevent the possibility of seeing the stars. Humanity loses visual contact with the universe, while the streets of the city light up and the im-mediate material world occupies the entire capa-city of human perception.
The theme of the twelve constellations of the Ecliptic line is evoked in this version and incites the viewer to take a glimpse at this paradox.
Wandering stars appear ephemeral printed on the side walk of the CCA on the inaugural day.
