PASCAL DOMBIS Time Spirals
3 December 2009 - 23 Janurary 2010
The Cat Street Gallery is proud to present Time Spirals, the first solo show in Asia for renowned French multimedia artist Pascal Dombis. Featuring site-specific video installations, lenticular prints and large drawings and prints, the artist will transform the gallery space into a vivid optical display.
For more than 15 years, Dombis has been employing computers and algorithms in the creation of his dynamic art. The artist is known for excessively repeating one simple process until it becomes irrational and seemingly out of control. As a result there is a great paradox at the heart of Dombis' work between orderly control of a simple rule and unpredictable results. The process is simultaneously random and mechanical, a machine creates the mathematical process but the resulting artwork effectively takes on a life of its own.
A key work in the show is CensorZip, a media projection which explores the notion of censorship in China. The mass of overlaid images is drawn from a Google keyword search, a search which would be censored in China but permitted in Hong Kong The results are therefore random but respond to a specific line of enquiry made by the artist. Spin is an abstract work which is cultivated from a proliferation of thousands of spinning circles. The hypnotic video display is based on a simple rule repeated an illogical number of times, causing something which was once independent and simple to appear increasingly chaotic and ominous.
Visually Dombis' work is fascinating, the viewer is put in a position where by they cannot consume every image because of the vast number that are juxtaposed together, subsequently they find themselves drawn into Dobmis' hypnotic and addictive time spirals. It is this powerful aesthetic combined with an engaging conceptual approach that makes the artist's work so captivating.
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