Nanuka Tchitchoua & Wade Ivy
OUTOPIA
It is tempting to think of Utopia as the penultimate expression of civilization, but as originally coined by Sir Thomas More, it was never meant to denote an actual place, but specifically refers to a non-existent fictional island society. Literally “No-Place”, it is a satire reflecting our troubles, inverting our destructive nature.
In conjunction with the Beekeeping Institute of the Poetic Research, the exhibition offers viewers an invented world in this spirit – utopian visions unbound by practical concerns. With gestures, patterns and surface, paintings by Nanuka Tchitchoua that evoke an alternate dimension of green utopias and to interact with and complement these works – digitally animated video works and the Mwown sound system by T. Wade Ivy
Forms are disconnected from their rational places and re-contextualized in a playful arrangement, new characters on the mind’s stage. What seems to be a swimmer – is shaped like a swimmer, is in fact a flower in a field of stars. A leaf is a face. A deer is a memory in a forest of bricks, the bricks are cells, escape from which is possible by following the flame.
The roots of the inspiration for Outopia lies in a quote by the author of much of the Museum of Jurassic Technology’s mysterious literature:
”All of nature in its awful vastness and incomprehensible complexity is in the end interrelated — worlds within worlds within worlds: the seen and the unseen — the physical and the immaterial are all connected — each exerting influence on the next — bound, as it were, by chains of analogy — magnetic chains. Every decision, every action mirrors, ripples, reflects and echoes throughout the whole of creation. The world is indeed bound with secret knots.” -Valentine Worth
