in motion
6 – 27 November 2010
Opening Saturday 6 November at 14:00 Preview by appointment
Exhibition catalogue available from the gallery, or scroll down for the online link
Please join us for an artist’s talk on Saturday 20 November at 14:00
'In reality, an artist is a theoretician, a manipulator and creator of forms in movement. Seen from the point of view of art, all our knowledge and our actions are but aesthetic expressions of forms and their transformations.'
Iannis Xenakis Diatope 1978
In his current exhibition at GALLERY AOP, Marcus Neustetter presents an extensive body of pen and ink drawings on paper, 10 small drypoint prints, augmented by a video installation and a series of digital light drawings.
In previous work, Neustetter followed the trajectory of a static, vertical axis, either looking down on the earth from, say, the seat of a plane and drawing the traces of landscape he observed below in map-like form; or looking up into the night sky, drawing the spaces between the stars.
In his latest work, it seems as though he has tilted this axis, animated it, and put it in motion as with the Google Earth video, Johannesburg to Johannesburg North South. The spinning of the earth around this novel imaginary latitudinal axis is echoed in his mark-making in a series of drawings which he did while exploring such far flung locations as the Canadian Rockies (by car), the stretch of land between Dakar and Touba in Senegal (by bus), the Hudson Valley, north of New York (by train) or the fjords of Norway (by ferry).
The title of the exhibition alludes to the marks in these drawings which were made while ‘in motion’ (traveling), or while attending a live music performance. The drawings not only imitate, or ‘perform’ movement, they also suggest something of the essential concept of what motion is, or what it means to be ‘in motion’. As such, the marks on the paper can be likened to gestures, rather than traces, manipulated and created compulsively and automatically.
