Image from Caution Matter installation
Image from Caution Matter installation
CAUTION MATTER by Liliane Lijn and Jamie Allen opened on 17th January in Cambridge filling the ten high definition digital screens of the Ruskin Gallery with luminous colour. Caution Matter is a new exhibition about art, industry, and mythology which has been developed in the last few months by Lijn, a poet and visual artist and Allen, a sound and media artist. Lijn and Allen are embarking on a series of journeys to industry contexts across England and beyond documenting exposing and revealing the material and metaphorical realities of these often hidden environments. The exhibition which begins a tour at the Ruskin Gallery has been supported by Arts Council England and the artists also contributed to the Future Fluxus events programme on 17th January
See Guest Curator Bronac Ferran’s blog about Caution Matter: http://www.boundaryobject.org/id5.html
For Anglia Ruskin’s press release see: http://www.anglia.ac.uk/ruskin/en/home/news/archive/visualise.html
About Caution Matter:
Image from Caution Matter installationImage from Caution Matter installation
Image from Caution Matter installation
Caution Matter is a new collaboration between Liliane Lijn and Jamie Allen. It addresses interfaces between art and industry, a long-term preoccupation of both artists and sets this in the context of myth and wonderment.
Steel Fire Temple - Liliane Lijn
Artists Statement:
Our mutual interests lie in the material traces and energies of our collective unconscious; of ancient archetypes, and the myths surrounding them. It is worth considering how these timeless forms and images have come to inhabit the labyrinthine worlds of our society’s technological, military and industrial complexes. Industry transforms resources and generates the profusion of product that both feeds and is fed upon by our society. While often presented as an exploiter of people and planetary resources, to the point that it is hardly seen for its creativity or for its essential role at the core of our society, industry is chiefly concerned with the transformation of matter; transformations that in ancient times were the prerogative of the gods.
Caution Matter conveys the remarkable exchange of energies at work in processes that normally occur behind closed doors. Caution Matter calls attention to these processes, to materials and their incessant transformation all around us. Caution Matter asks us to observe the last dance of the material world. Caution is necessary as society is moving away from a matter based culture towards a data or information based culture. Caution and awareness are needed to negotiate our passage between the excesses of centralised control, and those of irresponsible individual freedom. Artists, like children, play and what is playing, if not the constant exercise of learning.
Liliane Lijn and Jamie Allen
January 2012
About the Artists:
Liliane Lijn was born in New York, studied in Paris and lives in London.
Working with light in its relation with matter, Lijn’s research centred practice makes extensive use of new technologies in a variety of media and materials to create works that view the world as energy.
She has been internationally exhibited since the 1960’s, during which time she met Fluxus artists Robert Filliou, Yoko Ono and Bryan Gysin and took part in Fluxus exhibitions. Her work is represented in important public and private collections in Britain, France, Australia and the United States. She is best known for her Poem Machines (1962), her kinetic Koans and her work with light. Lijn’s visionary epic poem Crossing Map was published by Thames & Hudson in 1983 and more recently the Mead Gallery published a monograph on her work authored by David Alan Mellor to coincide with a retrospective exhibition, Liliane Lijn: Works 1959-80 at the gallery.
During her ACE funded Space Sciences Laboratory residency in 2005, Lijn began working with aerogel, a material developed by NASA scientists to collect interstellar dust. Her most recent exhibitions are Light Years, both at the Sir John Soane Museum and at Riflemaker Gallery (till end January), United Enemies at the Henry Moore Institute and Republic of the Moon at FACT, Liverpool. Her work is also currently on display at Tate Britain in Signals and Indica. Lijn’s art/science collaboration, Solar Hills, has been commissioned as a major project for Marseille-Provence 2013.
Lijn is at present artist in residence at Culture Lab, Newcastle University. Samples of her work can be seen at: www.lilianelijn.com
Jamie Allen
