I often find myself wanting to get as far from the present as possible. Recently I’ve been obsessed with the extreme past. People of 20,000 years ago possessed creative and capable minds—the same as ours, apparently—and must have made countless works of art and culture, but because all of it dates from before the invention of writing, it’s utterly lost. Why do I want to escape the present? Because of the feeling of dread that I’m living through the end of something. In response, I feel an urge rising, like a psychic undertow, to pare everything away. This sometimes sharpens into the desire to strip my world of everything known and familiar. Of course, that’s exactly what seems to be happening these days, anyway, isn’t it? This is the source of dread. It helps to remember that if we are standing at the end of something, we must be standing at the beginning of something else, and whatever that thing turns out to be, it is not yet written.
S.P.
The installation is organized around a hand-made accordion book that unfolds from its case into a range of peaks and valleys. The pages feature 360-degree photographs of natural scenes taken with a spherical camera. This kind of photograph, called an HDRI, is a technical tool used to lend 3D objects a realistic appearance. 1 Since 2015, Price has been making 3D objects for 1 use in his artwork, and illuminating them with open-source HDRIs, including those in the exhibition. This is the first time he has showed the HDRIs themselves, which are not intended to be noticed; for one thing, projecting a spherical picture on to a plane creates distortions, like the ones seen here.
In an accompanying piece of writing, Price considers what human life might have been like some 20,000 years ago, prior to the invention of writing and everything else in our world. The text is printed on a series of rice-paper sheets embossed into the book, and also screen-printed on freestanding blocks of glass. On the walls is a series of paintings made by pouring loops and trails of raw gesso on a surface of rough, paper-like, wood fiber. Some of the more face-like improvisations were scanned into 3D software, which carefully filled these mask-like shapes with realistic-looking imagery of human muscle tissue. There are also two groups of framed works on paper that arose from Price’s feelings during moments of historical change: a series of ten ink drawings from 2015, titled Startup Era, and pencil drawings made during the pandemic lockdown.
Text and images from the accordion book appear again in a separate, smaller publication, which is on view in an adjoining room. Here, visitors can also listen to music: a new vinyl release that Price composed contemporaneously with the exhibition works and intended as a soundtrack, a newly remastered box set of Price’s older recordings, and playlists and records by local musicians.
at Galerie Gisela Capitain, Zweigstelle Capitain V – C. A. S. A. Palazzo Degas, Naples
until May 4, 2024