LONDON.- Under a falling sky brings together five artists whose work evidences the space between reality and fictive states and the subjective distortions of the authentic in archaeology, folklore and storytelling.

This exhibition takes as its starting point the shifting perspectives of labour and industry, technology and nature and the fragments of varying potential outcomes, violent and destructive, utopian and otherwise, in the transformation of something new into something other.

John Divola’s photographic Diptych series produced during the early 1980s juxtapose two antithetical images, harmonised with the use of colour saturation gels. With this act, the immediate foreground of the image is coloured with an unnatural hue, yet the background retains its natural ambiance, creating a sense of psychedelic photographic illusion. Here, Untitled (83DPT21), 1983 a close up of a dolphin is tinted magenta and shown alongside a series of variously coloured formal squares in the process of flipping, or as a cube deconstructing. Two of the shapes are similarly tinted providing an aesthetic alliance, and an allusion to the dolphin jumping and diving as the squares rise and collapse.

Also presented is Untitled (83DPT6) which sees the sawdust and tree branch interior of some unseen caged animal’s habitat, viewed from outside and saturated in blue, show alongside bi-fold square cards with their mirrored centre removed, coloured blue and red. The use of colour and the diptych format allows the works to hover between two forms of representation, the symbolic and the indexical.

Divola speaks of this series; I was interested in the relationship between the abstract and the specific. If you paint a goat, it is an emblem of “goatness”, but if you photograph a goat it is a specific goat. What interested me about photographs was their inertia in terms of being drawn into the realm of the symbolic; there is always some kind of tug back to specificity. If you take a coloured gel and you project it onto the goat, then it pushes it a little more towards the symbolic. The thing I like about diptychs is that they herald a kind of cognitive address, “Why are those two pictures together?” But if you have two incongruous images that have a common colour, it again tugs against the initial analytic impulse.

Beatrice Gibson’s 2012 film Agatha is a psychosexual sci-fi about a planet without speech. Presented here in an exhibition almost entirely devoid of the human figure, its narrator, ambiguous in gender and function, weaves us slowly through a mental and physical landscape, observing and chronicling a space beyond words. Based on a dream had by the radical British composer Cornelius Cardew. Without language to describe it, the space itself is unavoidably altered, and the film invites an appraisal of the relationship between word and land; between the physical and conceptual, the signified and signifier: once it is named, it is.

Curator Amy Budd speaks of Gibson’s practice; …her films are composite works, collaging together sound, literature and multiple authors to explore the slippery operations of language and difficulties in representation. Born out of interests in improvisation and collective production, Gibson’s films blend social modes of working with a diverse range of references, from the experimental music of Cornelius Cardew to the musicality of speech found in the operas of Robert Ashley and writings of Gertrude Stein, and typographical experiments of BS Johnson. As a result, her wholly collaborative films function as elegiac exquisite corpses, their socially engaged foundations challenging conventional notions of authorship and filmmaking.

In the exploration of the altered readymade, Cyprien Gaillard navigates and examines perceived benign objects through an anthropological lens. Gaillard’s Untitled (Tooth) 2015 series presents us with fragments of industrial construction equipment, reappropriated from their original use and function and presented in specially fabricated vitrines, generally used in the preservation and display of museum antiquities. Gaillard here acts as explorer and archaeologist, these ‘teeth’, taken from the bucket of excavation machinery, bear the brunt of the digging process, becoming blunt from use, they’re discarded and replaced. In this series, Gaillard reflects upon meanings and memories of monuments and landscapes that have been erased and replaced by the effects of time and social and cultural transformation. Investigating time and historical remembrance as demonstrated in forgotten monuments, wrecked ruins, and artefacts. Presented here in a line-up of three, the works correlate with the building and regeneration happening outside of the gallery windows.

Curator Ali Subtonic speaks of the series; Gaillard has been visiting demolition sites and looking at bulldozers and other heavy equipment over the past decade, wanting to get a closer look at the machines responsible for clearing rubble and erasing history. He zeroed in on the excavator attachments—yellow cast-iron tools that bear a striking resemblance to pre-Columbian artefacts. Gaillard refers to them as “teeth.” They are fragments of the larger excavator machines, resembling pre-historic artefacts.

Cyprien Gaillard’s practice lays between the intersection of history and nature, and humankind’s relationship to both. He confronts the many contradictions of the built environment, his works deal with the cyclical nature of time and he is particularly attracted to dereliction: I’m interested in things failing, in the beauty of failure, and the fall in general.

Working with a similarly archaeological motivation, Michail Pirgelis works with a limited set of materials in the production of his sculptures, that of discarded fuselage and interiors from aeronautical bodies, sought primarily from California and Arizona’s aircraft ‘bone-yards’. Pirgelis preferring to source from the US as Europe’s aeronautical authority has stricter rules for the dismantlement of decommissioned aircraft, making it difficult to obtain specific original parts. Additionally, the intense environment and weather conditions of the desert exposes his materials to the elements which results in a specific surface patina. Each component from overhead lockers, seat belts, machinery and even an aircraft’s economical kitchen, as in Kapsel 2, 2012 presented here, which floats almost imperceptibly above the gallery floor, has been mined, dismantled and used as the source for sculpture from these defunct machines. Each dislocated fragment revealing the internal intricacy of their construction. Pirgelis minimally and subtly intervenes with his source materials surface, cutting a cross-section from an entire fuselage, presenting a simple panel cut out untreated, sometimes coloured, as a disrupted monochrome, door and window sections have been mirror polished, as in Pre, 2016.

Variously installed directly onto or leaning against the gallery walls, these objects are inverted, reflecting their surrounding interiors and becoming an existential void into the unknown, a portal to another world. Specific to these materials is countless man-hours of mechanical, technical and design innovation in adherence to commercial travel guidelines, yet in their abandonment as historic, past-use relics, Pirgelis appropriates and re-narrates these aircraft materials. Exploring the contradictions and ambiguities of contemporary air travel, both the physical reality and the psychological, our innate desire to fly and fear of air travel – their symbolic weightlessness and eventual succumb to the force of gravity is key to his work. Man’s dream of flying has always implied the desire to overcome human capabilities and limitations; as a result, these fragmented objects are imbued with a sense of failed hope.

Material transformation is of key importance in the practice of Daniel Turner, and the steps he takes to effect his alchemy are deliberately crude. Previously he has poured iodine into commercial sinks isolated out of presupposed context as sculpture and on floors, leant against pristine white walls the resulting marks left by his body imprint creating stains, each evidencing his interest in the rituals of work. This deconstructing of materials crosses over into his sculptural practice, where there is an inventive and physical use of industrial materials – from kerosene, charcoal, soot and rust; the raw products of burning, oxidisation and corrosion. Often exploiting the potential for an unnerving, or disquieting that lies beneath an object’s purely formal qualities, his work employs a fixed set of parameters culled from recognisable external routines and sources.

Presented here is Untitled, 2015 two industrial brass rods which the artist has customised with a Nickel plating and whose surface has been subject to a heat bearing cutting process revealing the gilded brass interior. Evocative of metal scaffolding rods that surround and penetrate building facades in urban cities, the violent act of cutting into the material is decidedly physical, yet carries the incidental elegance of an oil spill or rust-formation. Turner works in calculated gestures and an economy of mean that disrupts the standardised multiple and serial manufacturing process of the Nickel plated rods, taking them from purposeful building material to passive object. Turner displaces his work through an objects isolation, imposing a perceptual encounter through his objects severance from any sense of its original utility.

In utilising products or byproducts of industrial manufacture; materials which are produced and integral, yet rarely seen, in their revealing Turner emphasises their uncanny, something which is at once familiar yet unknown, this bears an anxiety, his works are both at once alluring and repellent.