Rob Chavasse: Earth Wire

I rowed frantically, and arrived, incredibly, at my destination (for I did not understand the compass; I had lost my bearings; I had no hat and I was ill, haunted by hallucina- tions)…I stayed in the boat for more than a day, reliving that horrible expe- rience, forgetting that I had arrived at my journey’s end.

– The Invention of Morel, Jorge Luis Borges, 1964

A network of conflicting flows, both physical and intangible, run through Earth Wire. Upon arrival the visitor passes through an airlock of contrasting blasts of hot and cold, the natural environment of the space immediately subverted, signaling an elemental departure. In the office, communications have been sabotaged, perhaps by an electrical fire or lightning strike, while in the gallery streams leak from non-existent holes. A sense of flux and disorder purveys throughout the installation as glimpses of information occa- sionally reveal themselves, in the form of buried images within discarded monitors. At the centre of this is a film that compounds the displacement and ambiguity, as narrative ebbs and flows.

Dodgems drift around the arena, elegiacally shepherded by their keepers who waltz across the network of cars, realigning their matter. The chaos of the collisions is marshaled and redistributed, a frenzy of energy harnessed by an elegant ritual. Two acts simultaneously occur, existing on very different planes, but weaving in and out of each other like strands of DNA. Previously, a lamb careers across a field in a bizarre oculus-rift like experiment, seemingly driven by an out of control sat- nav. Pastoral scenes clash with virtu- al reality conduits, as unlikely networks overlap, conflating and confusing the natural order of things, opening new means of transfer.

Rob Chavasse (1984, UK), lives and works in London. Selected exhibitions include Ghostie!, The Royal Standard, Liver- pool (2014), Sand In The Disk Drive, Rod Barton, Lon- don (2014), Thank you, Jupiter Woods, London (2014), A Sense Of Things, Zabludowicz Collection, London (2014), Off Season, The Sunday Painter, London (2013), Palazzo Peckham, Venice, 2013