Translation

Curated by Rachel Anne Farquharson, 2013 03.

A translation can be many things: It can be a conversion or transformation from one physical form to another, it can be a progression in biological stage, and it can even be, in the most geometric of terms, the movement of a shape along an axis. Within art's pedagogical premise, the most apt definition for translation might be the rendering of something into one's own language, semiotically or aesthetically. Viewed through this lens, geographies that are foreign, ideologies that are suspect, and modes of technology to which we find ourselves unwittingly beholden need a level plane upon which to exist in globalized society. The arrow of understanding, as Translation permits, rarely points in one direction, however. The exhibition provides recourse to how translations can also abet the fetishization of objects, enabling simple acts to suddenly become estranged.

Each artist in Translation confronts the banal, at once making it pliable to our understanding and relocating it in the realm of the monumental through inherently indexical material. Alex Fischer reappropriates digital imagery culled from today's archival internet abyss, exacting the terror of the sublime through an exposition of our dissolved communion with nature. As the artist's high-resolution content surpasses any interface capable of displaying the work in its "natural state", it is revealed that human vision has entered into stalemate with contemporary pixel acuity and printing technology.

In conversation, the artists in this exhibition aim to translate aspects of life, either by material or digital processes. Transformed in these ways, the landscapes of social, psychic, cultural, physical and political content breach the boundaries of ordinary experience, inciting their audience to new personal and collective understanding.