Tomorrow’s World

For further information regarding Tomorrow's World exhibition and ongoing collaboration please visit: Tomorrowsworldexhibition.blogspot.co.uk

*** Current Exhibition at Project Number PV 18th May 2012 ***

Tomorrow's World #2 @ Project Number / 6

A two‐man exhibition and ongoing collaboration by Dave Evans & Robin Tarbet

Project Number : London

Exhibition open weekends: May 19^th 20^th and 26^th 27^th and June 2^nd 3^rd 2012.

Weekday viewing’s by appointment only. 

Private View Friday: 18th May 6‐9pm

Tomorrow’s World is an exhibition of working ideas and material experiments with the aim to test out and develop initial concepts to create an open dialogue with the audience in a gallery environment. Beginning at Rogue Studios Project Space in early 2012 and soon in its second edition at Project Number, the collaboration brings together two artists who examine the material residue of technological progress. Evans and Tarbet’s re-workings of past visions of the future and more recent obsolete technologies attempts to make a concrete punctuation in the unceasing forward flow of perpetual growth; to not only explore the ideology of progress under the conditions of late capitalism, but also question the polemic nature of technological progress itself. Today we live in a technologically driven society where the latest innovation soon becomes outdated and obsolete. Internal systems are automatically updated, infrastructure is invisible and knowledge is hidden behind a shiny plastic façade accessible to only a few. The New Millennium is not the science fiction inspired futuristic landscape as promised in our 80s childhoods. Time has passed, technology has advanced, but when a common device fails most of us are rendered helpless. Economically, a machine’s failure is just another disposable material casualty: the product of a culture of consumption that frequently highlights our own human vulnerability, assuming the role of being mere operators with only a vague understanding of the tools we depend upon. Tomorrow’s world is a failed concept: an impossible prediction, but a spectacular opportunity for re‐examining and questioning our present reality. Evans and Tarbet are not nostalgic of the past or pining for the future, but as artists are keen to explore the ideological and material world around them to consider the notion of progress.

Dave Evans ‐ ‘Satellite #1', 2011, Bedside lamp, plastic cup, aluminium cake case, plastic balls, bedside table (Left Image)
Robin Tarbet ‘Components Series: Heat Sinks’ 2012, C‐type print 78 x 82 cm ‐ Edition of 5 (Right Image)

Dave Evans explores the passage of time, and its subsequent labelling as history, the past, present and future. Recent works explore the transient nature of narratives of the future, looking at how the history of science fiction can be viewed as a series of failed attempts at imagining a future, which, by its very nature, is unknowable. In his work, this failure and transience is explored through building basic units of futuristic imagining, alien landscapes and rockets, using no allusion to permanence. Materials used retain a fragility, foil, paper, cardboard, are held together with string, or pins, or gravity, and although these objects ‘fly,’ there is no pretence to actual flight, objects are elevated or hung. Field recordings, made in museums and galleries around the UK are often combined with these constructions as a way of drawing in the whole ‘constructed’ conception of time. The sound recordings themselves are monuments to our organisational skills, they describe places where we try to reconstruct and make sense of past events, which again, like our science fictions, are ultimately unknowable, but through the act of listening, draw us into the present. 

 

Dave Evans (born 1975, Liverpool) studied at the Royal College of Art and is an artist and lecturer based in Liverpool. He is a senior studio member at the Royal Standard artist run space in Liverpool, and a Visiting Lecturer at Lincoln School of Art and Design. www.daveandfran.com

Robin Tarbet's practice is concerned with the physical materiality of everyday technology, and he approaches familiar consumer products from a wondrous and inquiring perspective. Tarbet assumes the role of a curious folk scientific explorer, which leads him to dismantle, dissect, and distort everyday technologies and appliances. Aesthetically he examines the architectural and conceptual similarities of the built environment to the increasingly technological yet mysterious worlds within. His work questions the stuff that is concealed on the inside of a computer, or whether there is anything to find behind the façade of the television screen. As far as searching for answers or technical understanding his approach deliberately adopts the material function of failure, inefficiency, and he utilizes the resistance of the objects in providing any new knowledge that can be applied. Tarbet's aim is not to reveal any secrets, but his curiosity is with uncovering an often eclectic and mysterious collection of real bits and pieces that with few visible moving parts or automated actions, work together to create the products desired function. It is with this real stuff that his own fascination with perceived reality, illusion and the unusual effects of scale and perspective combine. As an artist he substitutes his precise lack of mundane understanding with the notion of play, imagination and the potential for what could be, rather than what is.

Robin Tarbet (born 1981, Bath) studied at the Royal College of Art and is an artist and lecturer based in London. He is a Senior Lecturer in Fine Art Foundation Studies at Kingston University, and a Visiting Lecturer in Fine Art at Norwich University College of Art and Design. www.robintarbet.com.

For further information about the exhibition or to arrange a viewing please contact Rogue Project Space or email directly dave@evansdave.com or robintarbet@robintarbet.com

Tomorrow’s World #1
A two‐man exhibition by Dave Evans & Robin Tarbet

Rogue Project Space: Manchester

Exhibition open by appointment: 16th to 25th February 2012

Private View Friday: 24th February 6‐9pm

Rogue Project Space 66‐72 Chapeltown Street, Piccadilly, Manchester, M1 2WH  
t. +44 (0)161 273 7492 / e.info@rogueartistsstudios.co.uk / Open by appointment / www.rogueartistsstudios.co.uk