Michael Joaquin Grey: Orange between orange and Orange, London

Today sees the launch of Caroll/Fletcher’s new exhibition, Orange between orange and Orange by Michael Joaquin Grey. Running until 16 February, this show marks Grey’s first UK presentation since in 1992. An American artist and inventor, Grey has engaged in a recursive, playful exploration of our concept of development and its consequences. His work represents a distinctive body of work that escapes categorisation within traditional media and tropes. Regarding himself primarily as a “social sculptor”, the artist’s practice brings together computational cinema works, sculpture, paintings, photographs, drawings and installations to present an alternative cosmology that provokes viewers to reconsider the origins and consequences of the forms and frames of life.

Orange between orange and Orange, is a group of inter-related works that playfully transform the narratives and forms associated with the models and myths of Western science, art and spirituality into a personal cosmology and cultural map. Transforming the irreversible into the reversible and the linear into the cyclical, Grey takes on the role of choreographer of another code of sense and non-sense; a dream of causality.

The exhibition is made up of several pieces. So What (2005-2012) is a large-scale, unrecorded, generative film on multiple screens. In the work, the viewer repeatedly travels at exponentially increasing speeds from a pixel at the centre of the sun through outer space to the distant reaches of the solar system and back again. At particular points in this journey, this media-saturated universe is scattered with the voices of iconic figures, including Steve Jobs, Ella Fitzgerald, the Rolling Stones, Miles Davies, James Cameron, Marshal McLuhan, Werner Herzog and others. A presentation of sculptures and prints are found in Morphologies (2012), which is a collection of televisions, cameras, radios, telephones and musical instruments. These historic objects have framed and directed our view of the world, and they are distributed throughout the gallery space.

Another element of the exhibition is a Kindergarten-style sandpit filled with wooden blocks, echoing Grey’s conviction that how we “play” as children develops the codes, patterns and limits to how we “work”. Guests are encouraged to step into the sandpit to rediscover the value of play, wonder and intuitive thinking. Challenging the way we process the world, Orange between orange and Orange will analyse the way we interact with art and the environment we live in.

Michael Joaquin Grey: Orange between orange and Orange, 11 January until 16 February, Carroll/Fletcher, 56 – 57 Eastcastle St, London W1W 8EQ.

Credits
1. So What 2012, 2012, Computational cinema, Courtesy of the artist and Carroll/Fletcher.
2. Morphologies, 2012, Digital print on paper, Courtesy of the artist and Carroll/Fletcher.
3. So What 2012, 2012, Computational cinema, Courtesy of the artist and Carroll/Fletcher.