Julian McKinnon: Goodbye Arcadia
15 – 25th August 2012
Opens Tuesday 14th August 5.30pm
Artist talk Saturday 18th August 2.00pm
Goodbye Arcadia
An exploration of utopianism and its inherent failure
Be it through shifting ideology, environmental upheaval, or a slow devouring by the inescapable persistence of entropy, even the best and most virtuous conjurations of utopia will inevitably fall. The pastoral idyll of Romantic Arcadia, the classless industrial harmony of Soviet Russia, the hyper-tech mega-urbane promise of the future - none are immune.
Like a virus dependant on the body of its host, utopia soon dies when it emerges from the imagination - its existence limited to the amorphous realm of possibility. Surely then, in as far as utopia is concerned, the seeds of destruction are sown at the moment of material genesis. In exploring this concept I intend to create artworks that hover between resolution and dissolution; are the forms depicted under construction or falling apart? These two states are sides of a single coin.
“I am not making some things. I am making a synonym for the truth with all its falsehoods.” Julian Schnabel