The Infra

Peter Blamey

02.12.2015 - 18.12.2015
Opening 02.12.15 6-8pm
Artist Talks 17.12.15 6-7pm

The Infra explores facets of our everyday electrical infrastructures through remnants and artefacts both large and small. Viewed as if from a position just slightly into the future than the present day, this material has been approached not with the precision or scientific rigour characteristic of archaeology, but through the more fanciful and interpretive techniques of its cousin – antiquarianism. As much concerned with aesthetics as it was with a sense of history, antiquarianism seemed more an attempt to revivify the past in the present through strategies that recontextualised objects and their attendant meanings–as exemplified through ‘inaccurate’ but indexical processes such as rubbing–by emphasising the significance of impression over function. In doing so antiquarianism yielded a history of imagination, of a fascination with history, as much as it did historical data per se.

Most of the materials in this exhibition are technological artefacts (so-called ‘e-waste’) considered to have reached the end of their usefulness and subsequently illegally dumped. As such, these works are simply one of many possibilities arrived at during what is an ongoing process of salvage and reappraisal. To some degree this erases their recent designation as garbage (or as merely non-functional), and invests them with the sense of fascination that accompanies many processes of excavation and recovery in that their previously overlooked material characteristics are now reprioritised, their prospects reappraised. After all, the future is other people’s garbage, just like the past.