Required Ubiquity
From 22th May /30th June 2015
Invitated Artists :
Whitney Claflin – Goutam Ghosh – Patrick Hari
Cheyney Thompson – Padraig Timoney – Josh Tonsfeldt
Meaning From the Dictionary:
To have the gift of ubiquity, having the faculty of being present in all places or many places at the same time, with reference to some saints considered to have such ability conferred by God.
The word comes from the Latin ‘ubique’ which means ’everywhere’. Mediaeval philosophy utilised this property to explain the capacity of God to be contemporaneously present in every part of his creation.
A word applied in common discourse, almost abstract and empirically not applicable, but that is still so pervasive in everyday life. Each of us have been required many times to be ’across the board’ or to have the gift of ubiquity, and to that, technology often helps us reproduce this experience in the communication of texts or images. It is not solely an experience purely tied to a technical transmission, or of ‘teleportation’ but also a mental dimension that can be activated through the senses, when our highest concentration merges with the contemplation of a landscape or artwork.
Most times art produces this effect by catapulting our mind, which perceives sense-given visual data, into other dimensions, places and different times. Some artists have the capacity to make works that offer, either explicitly or internally concealed, those coordinates that allow the viewer to acquire the gift of ubiquity. An exemplary work might be Marcel Duchamp’s ‘The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Batchelors, Even’, also known as the Large Glass, where the levels are intelligible but at the same time alien, enough to produce a slippage of our perception to the vision of a transparent and three dimensional element.
Most of the time the alienating effect is stronger and more penetrating when it is above all connected directly with those images that reside in our collective memory, bringing back a seductive deja-vu capable of making us recollect all that sensory data that we suspected had been lost to us. Art’s capacity is above all in this, and when its residual content arrives with us in a second moment. After which, overpowered by ithe initial fascination, we discover the hidden path that allows us to begin the journey. Even if all this may turn out to be romantic, and we remember ubiquity as an antiquated word, contrarily for us it is contemporary. Which is why, despite that it can’t seem real to us, or seems absurd, we desire it unconsciously, above all because it is widely required by an economy that induces us to be present in different times and spaces simultaneously.