V (Valentine)

Anna Pogossova

Opening 03.10.18 6-8pm
Artist Talks 25.10.18 6-7pm

V (Valentine) is concerned with the overlapping of the fantastic and the technological as a common model for science fiction imagery, as part of a broader exploration of the semiotics and logic of fiction, and the ways in which cultural references and handed down codes of representation can validate belief, trigger interpretations, and habituated ways of seeing.

V describes possible relationships between recognisable, but often unrelated, iconographies, and takes them through to their logical conclusions, through a series of photographic works. The trajectories of each group of imagery are guided by familiar mythological syntax of science fiction or fantasy world building. The key orienting components of these environments bear resemblance to things seen before; on computer screens, televisions, museums and in cinemas. Their ubiquity, in pop culture fiction, is approached, not as arbitrary, but as an expression of a higher symbolic system of a collectively shared visual language, imbued with mythical qualities; A system which is paradoxically confined to an existing vocabulary of the corporeal to describe itself, and is bound by its aesthetics, buried metaphors and networks of associations.

As existing fictional worlds are mapped and described, new worlds spring into being, between the fantastic and familiar.