| AUG 2- 31 | ‘Garbage is where we should start to feel at home. Part of our daily perception of reality is that waste disappears from our world. When you go to the toilet, shit disappears; you flush it. Of course rationally you know its there somewhere in the sewage system, but at a certain level of your most elementary experience, it disappears from your world. The problem is trash doesn’t disappear. All that consumer choice ultimately designates is what one would like to ‘make garbage’. A false privation has been instilled in the technological consumer, creating wave upon wave of the perpetual New. This idea of Western people, in our artificial technological environment, alienated from the natural world is both an ecological and ideological myth. We are not abstract engineers who just exploit nature – we are nature, and while scientific and technological advancement have helped create the current ecological crisis, it all forms part of this unfathomable and impenetrable background.’
Zinzi Kennedy, Ben Johanson, 2013
FRUITLESS ARCHEOLOGY by ACAB marks a decisive shift in the art making of the young collective, while continuing an exploration of found material, the work installed at Five Walls moves beyond installation and introduces the work as sculpture. Three large scale sculptures sit implacably atop makeshift plinths, constructed from sizable pvc pipes and cylindrical concrete slabs. Black lighting, fluorescent paint and neon all collaborate with the salt-incrusted objects engendering dreamlike or mystical qualities, where forms subtly dissolve into an array of disorienting phosphorescent glows only to reform as recognisable objects; an electric guitar, a speaker, a mobile phone, a tangle of electrical cable – reminding us that these amorphous forms are in fact garbage.
Video interview thanks to Chantal Wynter | © Wynter Projects, 2013
images courtesy of ACAB Collective | © ACAB Collective, 2013