Curated by Christina Mitrentse and Jonas Ranson

A diverse group of international and London-based artists become wanderers in space and time, drawing from a vast fluid field of collective ideas. The celestial as the nocturnal experience filters through from anthropological investigations, focusing on the ontological dimension; the impulse of irrationality in scientific and architectural artifacts and the surreal poetics of contemporary technology which appear to have cosmological associations.

The exhibition Celestial Contrakt navigates through the terrain of the ‘celestial and ‘ethereal’ in an attempt to offer different entry and exit points to the theme and suggests alternate possibilities within the experiential environments. Schwartz Gallery is formed as an uncharted territory which provisionally describes two conceptions of artworks as ‘terrestrial’ and ‘celestial’. These create non-linear journeys that look beyond Materialist thought. The project brings artist and viewer together to a conception in which the ‘terrestrial’ world does not yet exist and can only arise in the sphere of the imagination.

If morning is characterized by surprise, expectation, and regeneration, darkness procures a different type of sentiment and consciousness. The premise of night engages many mythical poetic figurations inextricably linked to the nocturnal walk under the canopy of the constellation. Suggesting a state of irrational mystical delirium, the two-dimensional works, film, sculptural objects and performance, shed ‘light’ on the perception of quasi-scientific phenomena. They can be characterized as positing the supremacy of hallucination, generating illusions from different time and space. The implication is one that places the artists in a position of pre-reflective mysticism.

The content of works come alive and give birth to other bodies, free from materiality and gravity. Rather than an opaque geometry, we suggest an all pervading ethereality that is uncontrollable and ungraspable, causing a fusion between the physical and the metaphysical, the familiar and the unspecified. This manifestation serves to offset the potentially ’oppressive effect’ of ‘earth bound’ conceptual content. Within this context Celestial Contrakt is a positive vision of chaos and complexity that proposes the deconstruction of our conceptual mechanism.

12 November - 6 December 2009
Friday-Sunday 12-6pm
Private View 6-10pm Thursday 12 November 2009 

Opening Night Performance
Music By Douce Angoisse . Audio Mixes by Exitjesus

Artist talk 2pm Saturday 28 November
Late Night View until 9pm ( First Thursdays ) 3 December

Dominic Allan . Nikos Alexiou . Alex Bunn . Andrew Hladky . Bern Roche Farrelly .Stine Ljungdalh . Christina Mitrentse . Jonas Ranson . Lee Wagstaff . Marc Wayland

Schwartz Gallery
White Post Quay
92 White Post Lane
E9 5EN, UK

tel +44 (0) 782 893 7013

info@schwartzgallery.co.uk
www.schwartzgallery.co.uk

Transit:
Hackney Wick ( Overground ) or buses S2, 236,26, 30, 276, 388