Saturday 24 November 2012

Hannah Sawtell - Vendor


Hannah Sawtell Vendor
2012
Installation view, Bloomberg SPACE, London
Hannah Sawtell's Vendor, currently on display at Bloomberg SPACE, London, is one half of a 2-part exhibition completed after the artist's residency in the financial forecaster's office spaces. Paired with Osculator at London's ICA, this part of the coupled work consists of an installation of images culled from the internet displayed in purpose-built units which sit in between being sculptures in their own right, or stands for the display of the images they house.

This slick inventory of images, each mounted with a clinical precision in trade-show-display-styled structures on plates of toughened glass reminiscent of screens, relate different digitally rendered 'surfaces' and other found or appropriated 'contemporary material'. Sawtell sets up a slippage between the sensory and the virtual, a conflation of our senses of sight and touch.

Mirroring the experiencing of web-browsing through its dizzying force-feed of seemingly un-related, disparate imagery, Sawtell disrupts the relation of 2- and 3-dimensional disrupting our reading of these flat surfaces by presenting them in space. We have a sense  sense of a fleeting engagement with a mass of information. The work reflects and reflects upon the circulation of data and imagery in the contemporary digital age.

Vendor is on display at Bloomberg SPACE, London, until January 12th 2013.