Magic Touch
Artie Vierkant, Jessie Flood-Paddock, Kate Davis, Katja Novitskova, Pádraig Spillane
2 August – 20 September 2014
Katja Novitskova, Shapeshifters (2013-14). Courtesy of the artist and Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Berlin.
Magic Touch is an exhibition that features five contemporary artists whose works respond to the way that objects and technologies carry the imprint of the human body. The exhibition considers our changing relationships to objects, presenting works such as Kate Davis’ video installation Denkmal, which narrates the touch of common objects that recent technology has made redundant; and Katja Novitskova’s series of sculptural works Shapeshifters, made from hand-pressed epoxy clay, nail polish and broken computer wafers. In these works and others in the exhibition, there is an emphasis on the way that successive technologies create new forms of tactile relationships while disabling others.
Also included in Magic Touch are works by Pádraig Spillane, Jessie Flood-Paddock, and Artie Vierkant. Flood-Paddock presents works developed from her Nude series that elaborate a series of sculptural forms and surfaces based on the logo of a cosmetics company that promotes its products’ “invisibility,” while Pádraig Spillane’s photo-based works make manifest what the camera fails to capture of his human subjects. For his first exhibition in Ireland / Northern Ireland, New York-based artist Artie Vierkant presents a new iteration of his Fingerprints series of video works produced with digital techniques of fingerprinting and gesture capture.
Magic Touch has been developed through the recognition of the contemporary displacement of the human body. This is a displacement caused by the new technologies of our inter-connected ‘touch-screen’ world, and another kind of displacement that follows recent “post-humanist” philosophies that have undermined notions of human empowerment over things. As such, Magic Touch considers how the human body continues to imprint itself in new ways upon the objects and technologies that at first appear to dispel it on physical and metaphysical terms.
