If the on-again-off-again November rain is getting to you, and you’re longing for a bit of proper weather, then head down to Greatorex Street in Whitechapel for the relaunch of T1+2 Gallery as The HIVE.The two-part show features Venezuelan artist Javier Rodriguez’s ‘Chromatic Aberrations’ and young Brit David Stearn’s ‘Works’. The centrepiece of Stearn’s offering is a snow machine, which fills the gallery with a (slightly toxic) snowstorm and piles up in satisfying drifts on the gallery floor. Stearn’s work, which has previously included sculptures made of balloons, uses industrial materials to interrogate the relation between ‘built’ and ‘sculpted’. In this case the only built things in the exhibition are the stands which the snow machine rests on, so Stearn’s designation of himself as a sculptor is somewhat reliant on the exhibition invigilator’s facility with an on/off switch.
Rodriguez’s Chromatic Aberrations are a series of maculaturas, overprint sheets that display the cumulative blottings of an industrial printing press. Rodriquez is interested in the overproliferation of the mass-media and his works use solid and near-illegible masses of stained paper to question the veracity and opacity of the popular press.
The exhibition also features a film made at the nearby Aldgate Press, which is projected in the corridor outside the exhibition. The film neatly encapsulates the ideas that the two shows share about machinery and process. Walking down the darkened corridor towards the projection screen you feel rather as it you’re travelling along a gigantic industrial production line. Once you arrive at the gallery door, right in the glare of the projector, the line spits you out into the blinding whiteness of the exhibition, and straight into Stearn’s snowstorm.
Javier Rodriguez’s Chromatic Aberrations and David Stearn: Works, at The HIVE / T1+2 Gallery,
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