A Tall Drink of Water

Lewis Doherty

Opening 05.04.17 6-8pm
Artist Talks 27.04.17 6-7pm

Digital culture is inundated with impressions of life, the built environment and the natural world which many of us engage with and manipulate on a daily basis. The digital object or thing performs a vastly different role for us than physical objects and forms bearing with it an altered form of contingency and hence an altered physicality. A Tall Drink of Water is a semiotic charting of the kind of supposed physical properties and topographies of digital objects, images and media content in general and an exploration of how these same properties relate to human emotions and physicality and find relevance in contemporary sculpture and illustration.

Evacuated steel forms and neon scrawls stand as the surrogates to recognisable real world objects and figures; their idiosyncratic and illustrated nature alluding to the fallibility of digital renderings as well as the physical nature of the human-computer interface. These works deliberately straddle the line between sculpture and illustration just as digital objects and images exist between two and three dimensional planes. There is a subtle echo of modernist qualities of line and form here partnered with the nature of both a child’s drawing and an industrial mock-up owing to the artists use of both free-hand and digital illustration.

Partnering these frame-like forms are the subtle nods to the nervous human agency that defines our engagement with digital culture, self-reflexive statements and idioms here given a sculptural quality and standing as both the reminders of the narcissistic quality of our relationships with our digital selves and perhaps as the nonsense inner dialogues of digital objects themselves.