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Promised Land: ecologies of uncertainty

Joint research project between Reader Mark Wilson and long term collaborative partner, Professor Bryndís Snæbjörnsdóttir, leading to exhibition.

Promised Land takes as its starting point the idea of our reliance on fixed and hackneyed symbols and their relationship to the world they are intended to represent. The exhibition installation combined sculptural, video and printed elements within a single room. By juxtaposing selected symbols and other non-symbolic material elements, the work sets out to destabilise their apparent reliability, inviting instead readings of transient and shifting hybridity.

Pivotal to the installation was a series of wall-mounted prints depicting assemblages of translucent symbolic forms interspersed with silhouetted found objects. A group of art students from one of the art schools in the City was enlisted to assist in locating local discarded materials, cardboard and furniture in the preparation of the central, sculptural component of the installation. Two video works explored the idea in relation to human expressions of discomfort in respect of unwanted interspecific intruders onto domestic premises, including a text-based work which, over a period of around 10 minutes transformed the screen from black to (almost) white by the gradual overlaying of multiple short phrases.

Promised Land questions the constitution of the interspecific outsider or other within a dominant culture and the bases of acceptance or intolerance. The project considers how ecologies are identified, or simply go unnoticed, within cultures fixated on individual phenomena and ‘fixed’ identity. It explores how the association or juxtaposition of material bodies form new and changing phenomena and meaning, independent of human agency or perspective, and how the concept of human fear and discomfort in the context of domestic familiarity is manifest in unpredictable and disparate ways. As much as anything, through the deployment of an interspecific lens the work tests how routine and familiarity, central to our subconscious, may be disrupted and threatened sometimes overwhelmingly by marginal and persistent intrusion, both actual and imagined.