LONDON, ENGLAND.- White Cube presents “Cerith Wyn Evans - Look at that picture - How does it appear to you now? Does it seem to be Persisting?,” on view through December 6, 2003.  White Cube is pleased to present new work by London based artist Cerith Wyn Evans. Wyn Evans will exhibit an installation consisting of a field of transparent, crystal chandeliers momentarily flashing on and off, rendering Morse code from a series of texts driven through a network of hidden computers. The chandeliers are from different historical eras and as each lamp turns on and off, a soft, mellifluous language is created, one that suggests a wholly other structure of communication with intimations of an otherworldly presence or an improbable séance. Although each chandelier will have its own particular text, the installation will work as a polyphonous whole, a matrix of different narratives that transmit layers of possible and associative meaning. The text for each chandelier will be visible simultaneously on adjacent computer screens embedded in the gallery walls. 

The exhibition developed out of Wyn Evan’s readings of the American writer James Merril, whose late poetry was written through a Ouija board: an ostensible organising principle that allowed the author the freedom of creating non-sequential notations. Wyn Evans has often harnessed the potential of language to create moments of rupture, as well as delight, where romantic longing, desire and reality conjoin. His focus is not so much on the art object itself, but rather the things that it can suggest and most of his sculptural work seems to deal with trace and residue - not necessarily in a direct reference to a particular cultural source - but rather through emotive allusion, obfuscated by various layers of textual complexity. For Wyn Evans, an installation should work like a catalyst, a reservoir of possible meanings that, for the viewer, could unravel many discursive journeys. 

Wyn Evans originally made experimental films, and like the process of watching a film, most of his works rely on the power of imaginative potential and the liberating possibilities of fantasy. He has said that many of his works develop out of a fascination with ’entropy and decay’, ’taking great care to do something that is seemingly inconsequential, ephemeral or entirely absurd’ and for Wyn Evans, this notion of ’excess’ is an artistic rebellion against the formalisms of obedience inherent in everyday culture. Chandeliers are an over-determined symbol of luxury, fantasy and grandeur and by using them, Wyn Evans creates a sense of theatrical occasion. However, like most of the artist’s previous work, the installation contains a self-reflexive criticality of the conditions of its reception. In some senses, the show aims to disrupt any modernist notions of the ’purity’ of an artwork, and seems to acknowledge as well as send up Michael Fried’s Modernist dogma and well-known critique of Minimalism as an ’impure’ theatrical encounter. The use of crystal is also poignant as it is a material that is known to channel energy, a natural transmitter that, in this case, has been ’hijacked’ to transmit an encrypted language from elsewhere. 

Wyn Evans has often worked with existing texts, both in his earlier ’Firework’ pieces - literal constructions in wood of erratically remembered narrative excerpts - as well as in his ’Subtitle Series’, which employed a projected phrase on a wall to conjure up the idea of a film and with this, an entire romantic horizon. The artist has also made various other works with Morse code, employing specific texts that resonate with the particular location where the work is installed. For the Welsh Pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale, for example, he translated a text from a Welsh poet into Morse code and emitted it from a World War II search light. In his earlier ’Cleave’ installations, he refracted the light signals of Morse code off a rotating mirror ball to create dazzling and intense sensory environments. These works in turn developed out of his installation entitled ’Dreamachine’ (1998), which, as its name suggests, was a remake of Bryan Gysin’s Dreamachine, an experimental instrument invented as a way to tap into dream states and the unconscious of the ’viewer’ (’the first artwork made to be looked at with closed eyes’ - Gysin) occasioning the creation of ’autonomous movies’.  

Cerith Wyn Evans has exhibited in both solo and group exhibitions internationally. He has had solo exhibitions at Tate Britain, Kunsthaus Glarus and CCA Kitakyushu. In 2002 he took part in Documenta XI and in 2003 he represented Wales at the Venice Biennale. In 2004 he will have solo exhibitions at ARC, Paris; Camden Arts Centre, London; MIT and MFA, Boston and the Frankfurter Kunstverein. Taraxacum light supplied by RJM Furniture. Quadratti Chandelier by MAC London.