April 12, 2022 - June 04, 2022
The colour of Indigo, the colour used for a
‘blueprint’ permeates this exhibition. The architectural refences associated
with a blueprint - a means by which architects draw out ‘a plan for the future’
becomes paradoxical in the context of disorder. The impression of a universe
out of alignment as a result of the vicissitudes of the pandemic in the present has resonances to
plagues of the past. The long association of indigo with trade-routes alludes
to the economic routes by which The Bubonic plague and the current pandemic have
been spread.
In The Order of
Things, the English translation of Michel Foucault’s Les Mots et le
choses (1966), the first chapter, Las Meninas, examines the painting
Las Meninas by Velásquez, painted in 1656. This essay, etched into
copper plates, became the substrate from which a series of prints, artist’s
books, a video, and veils have been developed. The text is variously disrupted
through absences, gaps, and overlays. The disrupted text is an attempt to find
a visual metaphor for the way in which an ordered world, grammar, has been rendered
disordered, unreadable.
Velásquez
lived through the Great Plague of Seville,
1646–1652 occurring only a few years before his completion of the
painting Las Meninas. This particular strain is believed to have arrived
by ship from Algeria, it was spread north by coastal shipping, afflicting towns
and their hinterlands along the Mediterranean coast as far north as Barcelona. This was the greatest, but not the only, plague
of 17th century Spain. Blueprint for the Disorder of Things collapses time and space, moving between
references to the Great Plague in 16th and 17th century
Europe to references to the current Pandemic.
