Rogaland Kunstsenter is pleased to present a new group exhibition with artists Mikkel Carl, James Collins and Joe Hamilton. The three artists for An Anonymous System have been selected using the online software tool Curatron, developed by Platform Stockholm and artist Cameron MacLeod. Curatron is described as: «an anonymous system of peer evaluation and selection…». The artists have chosen An Anonymous System as the title for an exhibition in which many of the works enhance the everyday and the ordinary to address issues far larger and much more complex than what the materials and gestures are in and of themselves.
In ‘Perhaps I Made Painting Sick’ Mikkel Carl adds faux brick wall wall paper to the gallery, matching the exposed columns and adding an air of New York loft apartment chic ¬– the mother of post-industrial gentrification – to Stavanger. Piles of fake, melting snow, made from heat cut Styrofoam, makes up the artwork ‘Wealth Continuing to Snowcap the Economic Mountaintop.’ The work connects global warming, or ‘extreme weather’ as the Trump administration prefers to call it, to the increasingly uneven distribution of wealth.
James Collins uses found floral fabric as canvas for a series of small striped paintings. The stripes are created by floating oil paint over the top of a water based paint. In their wet state, oil and water repel one another, and it’s during this time that the work is done, using a rake. While at the Kunstsenter, Collins has also made a larger abstract painting. The painting is done by a process of erasure, and the imagery looks like it is coming from an ominous nothingness.
‘Field Signs’ is a body of work by Joe Hamilton that brings together logos, flags, icons and colour schemes that countries, multinational corporations and other organisations use to identify themselves. By arranging, layering, breaking and merging these symbols he illustrates the incomprehensible web of geopolitical power relations.