Katya Davar, Paul Noble,Torsten Slama use drawing and animation to present projections of alternative urban and social possibilities. Skirting dystopia, perhaps closer to the original meaning of utopia as ‘no place’, the artists project personal no places which blend flawed utopian fantasies and altered ecosystems and which question the possibilities for perfected urban-industrial societies.
Forking Ocean Path is a new body of work by Katja Davar comprising 3d animation and large-scale drawings. These works address the self-destructive nature of mankind and posit a possible outcome. Making reference to Leonardo da Vinci’s treatise on water, which addresses the integration of land and sea, Davar presents an undersea world devoid of human life. The imagery is poignant and the short, silent animation is an understated reminder of the precariousness of our civilisation and the force of natural phenomena.
Paul Noble’s Unified Nobson is an animation that ‘unifies’ the various section that make up ‘Nobson Newton’, the fantastical town depicted through extremely large meticulously crafted pencil drawings, each depicting a different building or location. Modelled on the new towns devised in the early 20th century to create a perfect fusion of the urban and rural, the drawings offer aerial perspectives over a fantastical cityscape in which each construction is crafted out of a grouping of letters that identifies its owner or function. Representing a utopian vision gone awry, ‘Nobson Newtown’ is meditation on planning, modernism, and the possibilities for renewal within dysfunction.
Torsten Slama’s coloured pencil drawings from the cycle Gardens of the machine culture re inspired by Chinese paintings and recall the aesthetics of the vintage science fiction. Modernist architecture and industrial constructions merge with rocky, cyclopean landscapes, sparsely grown with arboreal vegetation. Even if there are no humans on the scene; the buildings, just like the rocks and the muscular, sinewy trees function as their dignified, mineral or vegetable counterparts, as the individual personalities of which this civilisation constitute itself. The depicted worlds are anti-cities in which industry and architecture, like the humans who built the, are part of an evolved nature.
The exhibition title references the dystopian city in Paul Auster’s novel ‘ In the Country of Last Things’ – a ‘ haunting picture of a devastated futuristic world which chillingly shadows our own’ in which the ‘last things’ in the title refers not only to the disappearance of manufactured objects but also the fading memories of them and the words used to describe them.
In collaboration with The Drawing Room, London