GHOST LOAD (2014), Cecilia Brunson Projects, London

FROM CECILIA BRUNSON:

“Amy Gadney is an artist who marvels a the dynamic relationship we have with materials that surround us. Her first show at Cecilia Brunson Projects continues a practice of engaging with unlikely objects, amplifying their obscurity, and from this drawing out new, unexpected perceptions of life and meaning.

In GHOST LOAD, Gadney combines her abstract painting practice with appropriated techniques used by Kinetic artists of the 1960s and 1970s who used sealed boxes, cogs and gears to trick the eye. In Gadney’s case, light, movement and optical illusion are enhanced by the latest electro-luminescent (EL) technology. She constructs generalized replicas of discarded objects, explained only by their titles, and presents them as newly-ready-made pieces that fit the exact dimensions of the original. Matt, frosted acryclic shells prevent all reflection, and all corners are smoothed down to blur lines; the original materiality becomes nothing more than the air taken up the by items and operates like a memory, a phantom of their original form:

“Once we’ve found words for things, our understanding becomes over-shadowed by the language we use. This work is about the suspending the moment before definition and category, when things are subtle, strange and obscure, when we’re not sure of what we’re looking at and when our experience feels alive with potential” — Amy Gadney

The name of this exhibition is similarly to do with the intangible: ‘Ghost Load’ is a term taken from theatre jargon, used in relatio to the superstion of ensuring a theatre space never goes dark. By leaving on a light of the lowest possible wattage the visiton soulds would be kept from injursy. THrough the tgranformation of venustas (“beauty”) by altering utilitas (“usefulness”), Gadney creates uncanny version, or ‘ghosts’, of something that only exists in our imagination. The artist encourages us to rely on our intuition, our pre-language understanding of things - or that which is beyond translation into words - to interact with the object throuh sensig it, discoverin gboth the empirical and the abstract.