UNANIMOUS Group Exhibition at Brixton Downstairs, London, UK, November 2021
Consensus is rare. Are we all in agreement? Unlikely. Individuality, the working of many minds and bodies pulling and creating in myriad independent ways. We live our questions in so many directions and divergences, and it isn’t really art’s responsibility to declare its answers, let alone for these answers to be unanimous. Art moves around subject matter, generating a constellation of thoughts and possibilities. The artist may express or suggest, propose or project, or they may set out their own uncertainty in their work. Even the artist’s individual mind may not be unanimous. As viewers we’re invited in to this dialogue, bringing our own questions and constellations. The event of art is in this coming together - a meeting of minds, of objects, images, sounds, thoughts and forms.
The work in this exhibition is testament to the multi-directional push and pull of each artist’s practice and project. The works on show take us internally: into memory, psychology, spirituality, perception, self; as well as externally, into a contemporary worlds of consumerism, conspiracy, confusion, otherness, nature, society, culture, and it’s objects, thoughts and feelings. And still, at points, these works intersect, ideas and aesthetics meet and fertilise, it’s the same world, after all, and we’re all human.
Unanimous is a gathering of artists, ideas, works. If art is unanimous - one mind - then this gathering is perhaps a truer likeness of an authentic mind. At times chaotic, partially formed, confused, challenging. At times clear, in-flow, logical, and beautiful. Art and the mind - individual and collective - resonating with the world in which they dwell.
It’s hard to know, and on that we can potentially all agree.
It’s unanimous.
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