Vantage Points Pittsburgh Wood Street Galleries April 28, 2023

Vantage Points brings together two works, Present Shock and Vanishing Point 3:1 #3, both concerned with perspective and perception and how we experience and try to make sense of the world around us.

Present Shock

Present Shock draws inspiration from Alvin Toffler's seminal book "Future Shock," to create an installation that confronts the viewer with a barrage of statistical clocks representing real-time information about the world—from life-changing global events to the banal trivia of everyday existence—highlighting how the speed and volume of data in the Information Age present new challenges to our limited cognitive apparatus. Many of the statistics presented occur at timescales and spatial horizons that similarly defy our perception or comprehension. By disturbing the inertia of the here and now, the relentless data reveal the fluctuating state of dynamic transformation that characterizes life on earth.

Vanishing Point 3:1 #3

Inspired by Renaissance perspective drawings by Leon Battista Alberti, Leonardo Da Vinci and Albrecht Dürer, Vanishing Point 3:1 #3 plays with the rhythm of proportions, the harmony of form, and the interaction of colour in an improvisational meditation on perception. Each line, shape, and colour plays a role in constructing this generative audiovisual symphony. A rule-based system endlessly assembles and re-assembles fundamental elements into new abstract formations and harmonic sequences, producing novel compositions in a collaboration between man and machine. Light itself becomes an instrument here as colour frequencies are expressed through corresponding sounds. In a nod to Bauhaus design principles, simple geometric shapes protrude and recede, occasionally giving the illusion of depth and spatial configurations that seem almost solid but, ultimately, betray their instability and flicker, vibrate and dissolve.

About United Visual Artists

UVA (United Visual Artists) is a London based collective founded in 2003 by British artist Matt Clark. UVA’s diverse body of work integrates new technologies with traditional media such as sculpture, performance and site-specific installation.

Drawing from sources ranging from ancient philosophy to theoretical science, the practice explores the cultural frameworks and natural phenomena that shape our cognition, creating instruments that manipulate our perception and expose the relativity of our experiences. Rather than material objects, UVA’s works are better understood as events in time, in which the performance of light, sound and movement unfolds.

UVA has been commissioned internationally by institutions including the Barbican Curve Gallery, London, England; Manchester International Festival, Manchester, England; Royal Academy of Arts, London, England; Serpentine Gallery, London, England; The Wellcome Trust, London, England; Towner Gallery, East Sussex, England; Victoria & Albert Museum, London, England; YCAM, Tokyo, Japan, and others. Previous group exhibitions include Blain|Southern, London, England; Riflemaker, London, England; Bryce Wolkowitz, New York; Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul, Korea; and Power Station of Art, Shanghai, China.

In 2019 UVA staged Other Spaces, their largest solo show to date. The exhibition was presented in partnership with The Vinyl Factory & in collaboration with Fondation Cartier Pour L’art Contemporain, Paris.

UVA is collected by the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, France and MONA, Australia. Public works are sited internationally in Toronto, Dubai, Philadelphia and London.

The practice has an open and inclusive approach to collaboration and have worked with artists including choreographer Benjamin Millepied and the Paris Opéra Ballet, filmmaker Adam Curtis, and musicians Massive Attack, Battles, and James Blake. Most recently UVA collaborated with Christopher Bailey for the Autumn/Winter 2018 fashion runway show at Burberry.