We’re delighted the announce the launch of a new group show featuring Paul Doran, Katarzyna Gajewska and William York titled ‘Sifting Through The Commonplace’ which opens on Thursday 3rd September.
Sifting, whether physical or psychological, is a separation process. Sifting aims to unearth something or separate what is useful from what is not. Statisticians and data analysts sift through statistical data and mine social media data to identify trends, make forecasts, and extract insights for market research, surveillance and policy making. What data is collected, selected and interpreted determines the outcome. Sifting is subjective. Everyone and every institution bring their own inherent biases. Information we receive has been translated by data analysts to disseminate the messages they think are worth highlighting. Neglected data can camouflage, conceal, or disregard information pertaining to important socio-political issues. Sifting involves valued judgements.
When we sift through our minds, we introspect on the sensations, images, feelings, and thoughts at any given moment. The moments we experience are imbued with the meanings we have accumulated over a lifetime of joys, struggles, setbacks, milestones, achievements and mistakes. We sift through our past to find insights. But memory is mood dependent, self-constructed and pliable. As with any dataset we must analyse and evaluate our own memory’s reliability, our proneness to self-deception, denial, blaming and other ego-protecting strategies.
In a time of socio-economic upheaval and technological change the recollection of past experiences can remind us of our stable authenticity, the self in its commonplace. In the midst of a kaleidoscope of existential experiences, our memories sustain a sense of continuity and ground us in the constancy of our commonplace across time and change. In this sense the commonplace is the ordinary, the customary, the staples of our lives, that which we often take for granted, our relationships, our daily functions, our essential objects, our health. But experience reminds us that the flux and randomness of life is always commonplace, often beyond our control, for good and bad.
The commonplace now includes internet and social media data that connects us digitally to a real world where horror is also commonplace. Sifting through the commonplace in the middle of the global pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protests may unearth the Pandora’s box which should be opened to release the long-festering detritus of a culture focused on unsustainable progress, for the benefit of whom?