Cartography of Control

‘Cartography of Control’ includes drawings, installation and sculpture and takes its premise from a society that has become increasingly governed by rational thinking and scientific methodology. ‘Cartography of Control’ questions a purely mathematical description of our world and suggests that just as different maps can give different accounts of the same territory, so can different forms of knowledge reflect a more truthful image about the material world.

As Troika experiments with new ideas and processes, the artists continue to work across media including light, water and electricity. While the mark making involved in the works is at once deliberate and spontaneous, calculated and random, ‘Cartography of Control’ explores ideas around man made structures, control, repetitive actions and systems and how these coincide, conflict, or unite with the unpredictable, the unknowable, and irrational.

In ‘Testing Time’ (2014) is an installation in which a stream of water is brought to a halt, and time is visibly broken into distinct instances.

‘The Sum of all Possibilities’ (2014) is a suspended sculpture that unfolds itself through an apparent infinite process of metamorphosis which, in reality, is a 12 minute loop defined by mathematical relationships. Its slow and meditative movement is a playful yet subversive commentary on the nature of the sculptural form, highlighting the close and paradoxical relationship between the calculation of probabilities and the unexpectedness of experience, between time and perception, movement and finitude, form and flux.

 ‘Cartography of control’ (2014) is a series of drawings made from the marks left on paper by the attempted manipulation of a powerful electric charge. The outcome is both delicate and unruly, dominated by the tension between control over what is inherently uncontrollable. ‘Calculating the Universe’ (2014) is a series of works that consider the relationship between rules and the concepts of randomness and chaos. These works are constructed from thousands of dice by following simple repetitive rules from which random and always unique patterns emerge.