|
God is on Our Side
(solo show)
Curated by Raffaella Guidobono
Preview 26 Sept 2007
‘.... Tron meets the New Testament’
Visitor of Gordon Cheung’s Paradise Lost Exhibition,
2007
Gordon Cheung’s Laing Art Solo has retranslated the
entire 24 Black and White Paradise Lost prints of John Martin
who illustrated the epic poem of John Milton. It is the biblical
story of the fall of the rebel angels into Hell and the temptation
of Adam and Eve and their consequent eviction from paradise.
For Cheung he sees this archetypal story as having a metaphorical
relevance to the way how we have entered the 21st Century
with a marked urgency in the way we exist in harmony with
nature but also that the dominant ideology of consumerism
and Capitalism have parallell similarites. Both operate with
dynamic systems of fear to motivate believers into a ‘progressive’
movement by promising paradise/riches or hell/poverty. The
prints by John Martin became the focus of his new body of
work for the Laing Art Solo and commission as they were a
perfect convergence of his interests allowing him to reflect
his interests in power and belief systems and our obedience
to them.
Cheung uses the Financial Times stock listings as a metaphor
for the virtual space that surrounds all of us. He suggests
that there is a belief that Economics is the faith of a secular
people and that it is the fundamental binding agent of faith
that we believe that markets work. In fact markets as an idea
bear the attributes of God: what is today considered to be
omnipresent, omnipotent and omniscient? Perhaps not a divine
bearded figure sitting in the clouds but something called
the market. We even talk about the invisible hand with a kind
of metaphysical grasp when in fact economics is all about
the visible hands either shaking or slapping one and other
depending on who’s hand is who’s. By using Christian
imagery he ambiguosly converges the images of religious belief
and those that are rooted in the overarching economic ideology
of consumerism. By doing so Cheung collides them and forces
parallell readings so that we raise questions ultimately as
to why humanity needs these meta-ideologies.
Unosunove
Gallery
Palazzo Santacroce
via Degli Specci 20
00186 Roma Italia
t: +39 06 9761396
gallery@unosunove.com
|
