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Trying To Cope With Things That Aren't Human (Part One) analysing the relationships between our encounter with the natural world and the invented world.

The exhibition was reviewed in Art Monthly by Martin Herbert, Artforum (online) by Glen Helfand (critics pick) and previewed and reviewed in The Guardian and Artists Newsletter. “Parked outside the gallery is a 13-year-old Fiat Cinquecento, a vehicle that has seen better days and appears to know it. Across the top of its windscreen, in the space traditionally reserved for a ‘Wayne Loves Sharon’ decal, is a sun-strip that reads ‘Eventually I will rust and die’. The car belongs to the gallery owner, but the concept – and the lovingly miniaturised version of the same car inside the venue, whose scaled-down sticker says, slightly threateningly, ‘Before I go I will take some of you with me’ – belongs to Ian Brown. This 12-artist show’s curator (and one-third of artists’ group Common Culture), Brown has come up with what is, if not a wholly original idea, one that I have never seen articulated in an art context. While any number of exhibitions over the last decade have anatomised our alienated relationship to nature, and while our uneasy interaction with an increasingly technological, man-made world remains grist for dystopian cyberneticists, this show sees both as interconnected hemispheres of a ‘non-human’ realm that we struggle to accommodate ourselves to, sentimentalising, and anxiously personalising, fearing it by turns.” Martin Herbert, Art Monthly 326, May 2009. The Mariele Neudecker commissioned work 400 Thousand Generations went on to be included in the major Royal Academy exhibition Earth: Art in a Changing Planet. Paul Rooney’s Letters That Rot Into Mulch, commissioned for the publication, was performed at Existential Territories at Toynbee Studios, London, became an installation at his solo show at Edinburgh Sculpture Studios and was included in the book Dust and Other Stories by Paul Rooney Edited by Jeremy Akerman and Eileen Daly ISBN 978 0 9556540 5 3 Works commissioned for the exhibition: http://www.morison.info/iusedtoloveher.html http://www.marieleneudecker.co.uk/marieleneudeckee.html http://richardtwalker.net/everything_goes_as_if_it_is_always_away.html http://richardtwalker.net/its_hard_to_find_because__i_cant_see_what_you_mean_to_me.html http://www.ibrown.co.uk/ibrown.co.uk/eventually.html