To See a World Through a Grain of Salt
OMR, Mexico City
8 September — 18 December, 2021
’These submerged, soupy landscapes, installed as flowing silk veils, look like painterly fantasies; they are the result of chemical reactions. When dissolved in sodium silicate, metal salts grow as if they were alive or imbued with a life force. This phenomenon, that has fascinated alchemists, provides a final twist in the alternate reading of history and points towards the final supremacy of life under the crystalline order of salt.’
— Eva Wilson
Print on voile,
Installation view ‘To see the world through a grain of salt’, OMR gallery, 2021
Photo: Jacob Flood
Photo: Jacob Flood
Print on voile,
Installation view ‘To see the world through a grain of salt’, OMR gallery, 2021
A series of paintings titled ‘Irma Watched over by Machines’ imagines how machines gaze at our present-day world. Composed in forty-eight shades of red, green, and blue, the works depict palm trees thrashing in hurricane winds; painterly renditions of digital images that were collected from publicly accessible web cam databases, CCTVs, and drones.
Installation view ‘To See a World through a Grain of Salt’, OMR Mexico City, 2020
Detail
Laburnum Street, 2021
Silicon waver with mesolithic flint tool hand knapped by experimental archeologist Dr. James Dilley,
32 x 32 x 5 cm
Digital C-type print mounted on acrylic onto aluminium,
121 x 201 x 4.8 cm
’In ‘Evolutionary Composite’, the artists juxtapose humankind’s earliest tool — a lumpen bi-face blade made from flint — with a state-of-the-art contemporary silicon wafer. Both are made of the same material, refined over 3.3 million years, as if salt through its own agency has forever driven human progress.’
— Ariane Koek
What if you started thinking of salt in terms of an entity with agency, taking shape by using humans to raise it out of earth, then gradually acquiring consciousness to finally come to dominate the planet and populate it with its own kind?
‘To See a World through a Grain of Salt’ brings together a series of works that form part of a complex re-evaluation of human history.
The focus of the narrative shifts away from a human protagonist and towards a non-human agent who, here, is devised as the real hero of an aeonian drama of world domination.
‘To See a World through a Grain of Salt’ is staged at OMR and is the third solo exhibition of the London-based art collective at the gallery.
The works in the exhibition consider the salt crystal as a conscious entity and the driving force behind a number of inventions and technologies without which human civilisation would not have developed as we know it. ‘Untertage’ asks what this progression might hold for the future.
’To See a World Through a Grain of Salt’
OMR, Mexico City
Sept 8, 2021 — Dec 17, 2021