Constellating Matters

As part of Artlicks Weekend Campbell Works presents: Constellating Matters

Opening reception: Thursday 2nd October 2014 6.00 – 9.00pm
Exhibition runs: 3rd October – 18th October 2014

Following a residency at Kunstlerhaus Lukas in northern Germany during Spring 2014, and an accompanying exhibition in Rostock through June and July, Campbell Works presents a version of Neil Taylor’s project Constellating Matters for London.

Neil Taylor’s work can often be beguiling and beautiful and yet somehow disturbing, and it is not always easy to put one’s finger on exactly what is so unsettling. This recent body has been created in response to a long-standing interest and ongoing research into the history of Central Africa and in particular the ‘Democratic Republic of’ Congo and its geographical region. Constellating Matters joins dots through history and makes connections that have no specific cultural or time sequential logic yet in their juxtaposition have a strange resonance and even contemporary relevance. 

Focusing on parallels between myth-making and history telling, Taylor draws both metaphorically and literally, focus and attention onto the human capacity for creative thinking and self-justification backed by elaborate belief systems, some of which have survived millennia and others that are very much of our time. It is perhaps no coincidence that the very materials feeding our insatiable thirst for mobile technologies, and now being extracted from the birthplace of humanity, are truly giving access, albeit through the veil of the ‘black 
mirror’, to a metaphorical Tree of Knowledge.

So we are left pondering what exactly is the human condition: we are infinitely capable of creating both change and horrific consequences for fellow humans, and all of nature too, as long as we truly believe in our story? It’s no wonder we have successively glorified and held sacred belief systems, they have proven very useful again and again, our golden ticket, and yet with belief comes doubt’s long dark shadow that we like not to think about, as it casts deep shade across our desires.