FLOATING POINTS

Gavin Baily, Tom Corby

Ambika P3, University of Westminster,
35 Marylebone Road, London NW1 5LS

Private view:  6.00 pm Friday 18th December

Exhibition Opening hours:  Saturday 19th Dec – Monday 21 Dec,  12.00-6.00

We are pleased to announce a new exhibition by Gavin Baily and Tom Corby consisting of 3 screen-based projects and an installation set within P3’s underground galleries.

The Northern Polar Studies (2015) and Minima, Maxima (2015) are premiered, while The Southern Ocean Studies (in collaboration with Dr Jonathan Mackenzie 2010), and Cyclone (2005 – 2015) are uniquely shown together for the first time. All 4 works employ various forms of climate or meteorological data to visually and physically condense the aleatory, hidden and the systemic aspects of sites and landscapes as large-scale data animation or installation.

Art has long found ways to make tangible the Earth’s exhalation of atmospheres and climates. This exhibition can be seen as part of this tradition, but breaks from it by bringing contemporary scientific technologies, data and institutions to bear to show how universal concepts of human relations with landscape are still  pertinent in a contemporary context of accelerating climate change.  Additionally, the complex entanglements of the social, material, atmospheric and geographic explored throughout these works, extend our feel for landscape and also our sense of how time functions in it. Landscape through its laminations, layering and morphologies, is conceived in this work as a recording device that tracks the Earth’s changing energy signatures. This movement of time and matter reimagines environmental terrains as extended temporal forms resultant from long-term changes; which we might propose of as ‘deep time landscapes’.

This work has been made in collaboration with the British Antarctic Survey, and special thanks goes to Nathan Cunningham, Dr Clare Tancell, Professor David Walton, Dr Beatrix Schlarb-Ridley, Professor Mike Meredith, and Pete Bucktrout. Funding for this work has been by Arts Council England, the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Natural Environment Research Council, and the Centre for Research in Education, Art and Media at the University of Westminster.