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A Planetary Order brings together three artists who, though working in very different media, all explore meta-narratives of time, landscape and systematic abstraction with a combination of sincerity and playfulness. The juxtaposition of painting, sculpture and new media works emphasises the conceptual concerns of the artists who also share a meticulous minimalist aesthetic. The works hover between seriousness and humour, the romantic and the rational, reduction and sublime scale, all within a dialogue which encompasses works made both with highly traditional means and the most current new media technology. The exhibition reflects a growing interest in a return to metaphysical themes, which though sincere, is not without critical distance and awareness of the comical.
The exhibition found its name in Martin John Callanan’s A Planetary Order (Terrestrial Cloud Globe) a 3D printed globe which, sitting directly on the gallery floor, on close inspection reveals the cloud cover of one single moment in time. This inconspicuous piece is in fact an ambitious ‘physical visualisation of real-time scientific data’ taken from cloud monitoring satellites overseen by NASA and the European Space Agency. Callanan’s transformation of data into artworks which articulate both the enormity of interconnected global systems and our place within them, continues with his most recent work, Departure of All; a flight departure board displaying the flight information for every international airport around the world. Running in real time, the speed of global transit creates a dizzying account of single moments. Katie Paterson provides a counterpoint to this overwhelm with her imperceptibly slow work, As The World Turns; a record player which, rotating at the speed of the earth, plays Vivaldi’s Four Seasons audible through headphones to only the most attentive listener. As with Callanan, Paterson’s artwork occupies a space far greater than the actual work- activating an imaginative space which is both metaphysical and comic; the record player suggesting the turning earth which we are able to look down upon. Along the long wall of the gallery hangs Notes on The Sea, a (diptych in twelve parts) the series of twelve minimal photorealist paintings calmly depicts fog veiled seascapes as polarities of night and day. In this work the archetypal romantic image enters into a contradiction with itself as it becomes part of a system. Playing with notions of duration, mathematic abstraction, and the possibility of painting a beautiful landscape, Partridge’s attempt to rationalize the epitomised romantic landscape is both meditative and absurd.
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