White Cube has opened a stunning display of new works by the influential London-based Welsh sculptor and filmmaker Cerith Wyn Evans who is best known for his neon and text works. The eponymous site-specific intervention in the South Gallery of White Cube’s London Bermondsey space comprises a number of new sculptural neon works, a series of kinetic elements, a large sound sculpture, and an improvised Morse code piece.According to White Cube, in this exhibition Evans has focused on ideas “around the flows of energy via material and immaterial conduits, circuitry and choreology – the practice of translating movement into notational form.” Responding the architecture of South Gallery II, Evans has created an immersive environment that prods at the periphery of human consciousness, challenging notions of perception, cognition, subjectivity, and reality.At the centre of the intervention are four ceiling-suspended neon sculptures. Three of the sculptures (Neon forms [after Noh I, II and III], all 2015) take their forms from the minutely prescribed movements of Japanese Noh theatre while the fourth, “The Illuminating Gas…(after Oculist Witnesses), 2015,” is inspired by the mysterious circular “Oculist Witnesses” in Marcel Duchamp’s work “The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even” (1915–23).“The Illuminating Gas [...] systematically imposes a formless anxiety, diverging yet centrifugal, directed not toward the most withheld secrets but toward the imitation and the transmutation of the most visible forms: each word at the same time energised and drained, filled and emptied by the possibility of there being yet another meaning, this one or that one, or neither one nor the other, but a third, or none...” Michel Foucault.Interspersed amongst the neon works are plants placed on turntables that rotate almost imperceptibly, enhancing the otherworldly atmosphere. At the far end of the room a sound sculpture constructed of 19 “breathing” transparent glass flutes emit what White Cube describes as “a mellifluous breath-like sound.” In the corridor space Evans has reconfigured an existing ceiling light fixture to convey in Morse code a text that describes the transit of the moon creating a solar eclipse.“Cerith Wyn Evans” is at White Cube Bermondsey until November 15, 2015
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