Hypersurface
Ian Monroe, Michael Stubbs, Caragh Thuring
15th February - 9th March 2008
Rod Barton Invites, EC2

The artists in Hypersurface accelerate the prescribed languages of hand-made paintings and objects (or painted objects) by acknowledging their relationship to virtual and digital media.  These artists make object/paintings in the understanding that the ‘non-space’ of the flat world of the computer screen and virtual terminal creates a complex relationship with the artist making and the object made in physical space.

Monroe and Stubbs reference and incorporate the digital into the very fabric or surfaces of their object/paintings while Thuring re-contextualizes the making of paintings by reconfiguring the printed images of art history and popular culture.  However, these three artists repeatedly and seamlessly cross-over and re-mix these two distinctions.

For all these artists the quick/slow ‘overlap’ between the human body that navigates its position in the world through making object/paintings, with the immediacy of virtual communication that is neither visible or physically graspable, challenges the established hierarchy and order of distinct meaning systems.  An expanded palette of cultural references therefore become available which means that any useful signifier can be recovered or re-mixed as seems necessary.