WAGON is delighted to announce the group exhibition Mediated Existence, which features work by Joseph Calleja, I-Chern Lai and Katie Paterson at sleeper gallery in Edinburgh, Scotland.

The Nobel Prize-winning theoretical physicist Hideki Yukawa once said ”We can probably say that physical matter is something exists within our mind too, after all”. Just like we can acknowledge an apple because it is something round, red, solid and is called or stated as ‘apple’, the physical world encircling us is only recognised through a theoretical medium or mediation – such as language, numbers, colour and so on. We may be able to say that, in a sense, ‘the world’ we think we sense and perceive is always a mediated existence.

To explore this conceptual concern, the exhibition will invite work by three artists:

Joseph Calleja (b.1981 in Malta, currently based in Edinburgh) is an artist originally trained in Theology and Philosophy. Because of his fascination towards repercussions of the human act, his choice of media relates directly to the environment where the work unfolds. to define is to confine is a simple statement written by a typewriter onto a set of white A4 papers without ink. The resulting, gradually fading traces of five words are almost invisible. This is informed by and resonates with the artist’s experience in Japan a few years back – when he faced a possibility/impossibility around defining a conceptual idea across different languages and cultures.

I-Chern Lai (b.1985 in Taiwan, currently based in Taipei) is an artist who is radically concerned with the concept and system around media, archives, documentation and data in contemporary artistic activities and/or environments. As part of her ongoing project involving a series of residency, exhibition and workshop focusing on the mediation process itself, in Mediated Existence she extends her detection of ‘how does the mediated entity is not existing “purely”, but through or within the media?’ Her multi-layered examination explores the potential and limitation of a medium, at the same time verbalising and visualising how a medium rules our mind when we perceive an idea.

Katie Paterson (b.1981 in Glasgow, currently based in Berlin) is an artist whose creative practice is cross-medium, multi-disciplinary and conceptually driven, with emphasis on nature, ecology, geology and cosmology. In her ‘life-long project’ History of Darkness, she has been collecting discrete photographic images of darkness from different times and places in the Universe, spanning billions of years. Each identical onyx void, originally turned into 35mm slides, is numbered and annotated with distance in light years from Earth. This is another beautiful example of mediation and a conceptual – and poetic – approach towards a physical event and matter.

All three artists – although they vary in their nationalities and practices – once studied at and graduated from Edinburgh Collage of Art, University of Edinburgh.

Curated by Naoko Mabon
With cooperation from Ingleby, Edinburgh, and Collection SimonPaul

EXHIBITION DETAILS
Mediated Existence
Joseph Calleja // I-Chern Lai // Katie Paterson
21 October – 2 November 2016
Preview: Friday 21 October 5.30-7.00pm
sleeper, 6 Darnaway Street, Edinburgh, EH3 6BG
Monday-Friday 2-5pm