23 February - 14 June 2018
The Partners of Collyer Bristow Gallery invite you to the Gallery’s 25 year silver anniversary
Private View Thursday 22 February 6-8pm
Please RSVP here
Exhibition continues to 14 June 2018
Collyer Bristow Gallery, 4 Bedford Row, London WC1R 4TF
Arno Beck, George Bolster, Sasha Bowles, Karen David, Tim Ellis, Alex Evans, Geraint Evans, John Greenwood, Dan Hays, Marguerite Horner, Paula MacArthur, an Monroe, Kate Murdoch, Kitty Stirling, Alison Turnbull, Dina Varpahovsky, Rob Voerman, Jane Ward, Charlotte Warne Thomas and David Worthington.
Curated by Rosalind Davis
In the future men will be 'super masculine' and women will be 'ultra-feminine' In the future the 'psychic arts' will be put to practical use
In the future all material items will be free
In the future everyone's house will be like a little fortress
In the future everyone's house will be a total entertainment centre
In the future TV will be so good that the printed word will function as an artform only
In the future no one will live in cities
In the future everyone will think about love all the time
In the future there will be groups of wild people, living in the wilderness
In the future people will live in space
In the future everyone will have their own style of way-out clothes…
In the future there will be so much going on that no one will be able to keep track of it…
In 1985 David Byrne wrote the song ‘In the Future’, that laid out propositions or perhaps prophesies about the future as he saw it then. The lyrics describe a future through a series of paradoxical statements that now seem strangely prescient in describing a complex reality where contradictory truths co-exist.
In the future there will be so much going on that no one will be able to keep track of it….
In an ever more frenetic and information saturated society the above line resonates, with our digital footprints emblazoned across numerous systems and the development of AI, our ghosts are left in computers, phone or surveillance cameras, more information recorded than we could ever keep track of.
In this exhibition 20 artists seek to track and to trace, creating repositories of knowledge that look both forward and back, that address technology, organizational methods and information systems. Some choose to look at how we observe space, through sci-fi technologies or envision otherworldly species.
Others investigate things, not so easily tracked and measured; our values or our memories, the material possessions that represent love and desire; the things we hope not to forget, and what we want to take with us, that make us who we are or what we want to hold onto in the future…
In the future everyone will think about love all the time….
If life could be described as a continued collection of moments, joined together to become movement and story, then death, if not annihilation, could be said to be a continuum of revisited narratives for those we leave behind. Enclosed in two retro phone booths, Kitty Stirling’s video installations call up tales of insistent and suggestive stories. Perpetuated in evocative sounds and objects, they connect to people who fleetingly or permanently, knowingly or unwittingly have left a mark through the residue of a gesture, a word or an image. 50 Ways To Say Hello takes as its starting point the discovery of fifty undeleted recordings from an old answer-phone, retaining the voice of an ex-boyfriend who died in 2013. Amassed over a two-year span, each message uncannily starts with the same greeting - “Hoo Hoo.” In Good Morning Good Night, Kitty muses on our attempts to re-present the imperfect and continuous past through a collection of WhatsApp messages sent twice daily from a lady once met in a remote Indian village. As each greeting presents its cheery message, a sense of absurdity grows at the rapidity of the passing of our days.
