You don’t have to have a serious clinical problem to appreciate symmetry, order and repetition. It’s all around us, every day, so it’s no surprise that we are drawn to instances of these characteristics. They can be distracting, bring calm through familiarity, and satisfy our innate need for logical conclusions, and a group exhibition is providing a revealing look at how five artists approach repetition in the creative process.
Alistair Mackie, Yun-Kyung Jeong, Tom Dale, David Rickard and Oscar Santillan are the contributors to Obsessive Compulsive Order at London’s Copperfield Gallery. The first two artists explore the topic from the point of view of order in organic structures; Mackie processes cuttlefish bones into geometric tiles which he links together to form more complex patterns, while Jeong uses a series of printed leaf-shaped motifs. In an extraordinary feat of patience, Rickard spent a year sticking together exactly 100,000 “hundreds and thousands” cake sprinkles together to form a sphere, and we are asked to consider both the effort required and whether we really believe the artist’s statement – could you obsessively count them to make sure? Dale has collected watch and clock adverts from around the world, joining all those which show the hands at ten past two in a slowly rotating sculpture. Ecuadorian artist Oscar Santillan sat through all of James Dean’s films, taking screenshots every time the actor blinked and subverting his macho image with the vulnerability suggested by the action. The show runs until 15 June.
David Rickard,
One Hundred Thousand, 2004-5
100,000 individual ‘Hundreds and Thousands’, glue
9.5cm Ø
Tom Dale,
Deadspace, 2011
Wood, paper, paint, motor and fittings.
1220 x 60 x 2000cm
Oscar Santillan,
All the Blinks, 2010-2014
Inkject print,
210 x 133cm
Yun-Kyung Jeong,
Axonometric Jungle Ⅶ (Detail), 2013
180 x 150cm,
pencil on unprimed canvas
Tom Dale,
Deadspace, 2011
Wood, paper, paint, motor and fittings.
1220 x 60 x 2000cm
