Eleanor Avery, Chris Bond, Kate Cotching, Léa Donnan, Adam Norton, Sam Smith
GRANTPIRRIE 2005
In 1970, Alvin Toffler coined the term ‘Future Shock’ which became popularly understood as ‘a condition of insecurity, distress and disorientation in individuals and entire societies, brought on by the inability to cope with rapid societal and technological change.’[1] Thirty-five years later, as we continue to endure the increasingly refined barrage of mass media and the dehumanising manipulations of information technologies, one wonders what the cumulative effect of so many years of ‘shock’ might be? Although of course most of us lead relatively normal lives, there remains an underlying sense of terminal velocity. We are no longer ‘shocked’ by the undemocratic tendencies of government, the continuing erosion of moral values or even the absolute integration of capitalist ideologies into our everyday existence.
Although the works on display in Brainstorms: momentary psychological disturbances have not been produced explicitly with protest in mind, our inherent state of inertia invites a level of critical artistic intervention which stands subtly against the grain.
Clare Lewis, 2005
excerpt from the catalogue text
clare lewis 