KRYSTEN CUNNINGHAM in Paul's Art World
Paul's Art World
Krysten Cunningham: 3 to 4 @ Ritter Zamet, Unit 8, 80A Ashfield St - Whitechapel
To 15 May: www.ritterzamet.com
Look carefully to track down a first floor industrial unit just south of Whitechapel tube station, and you'll also find more of the recent trend towards sculpture with a video context. Krysten Cunningham has worked as a technician in a physics lab at the University of California over the past decade. In ‘Hypercube’ she re-narrated one of the lab’s educational films - of computer-generated cubes multiplying - to speculate on the possibility of a fourth dimension. This argued that there are four dimensions, and so if we have only three dimensions then all our thoughts and experiences must take place in the mind of a higher being. If we don’t agree with this, says the voiceover, we must recognise ourselves as beings of four dimensions - albeit we may not be conscious of the fourth. All of which feeds into a new video, in which up to six figures in red, green and blue demonstrate similar geographies in a kind of pose-dance with rods through which Cunningham hopes “we might ‘touch’ or glimpse a new spatial dimension”. The sculptures echo those concerns while mixing readymade and woven forms in a hippy meets op art meets native Indian style. So: equal parts science and mysticism, new age and Bauhaus pushing at the borders of craft and daft. Somehow it all coheres rather hypnotically, as we wonder how much is aesthetic and how much is cod. In a way, quite Lathamesque…