Simon Thompson

Urban Backgrounds

30 November – 27 January 2017

THEM

They are pure presence. But they are also pure absence: they lack without you. You animate them in a relation you can yield to but can never control. Their object-hood dissembles like an addict on the make. Such guile! With their blunt disposition and shameless inauthenticity, they perform a kind of cheap mimesis: copies without an original, bargain basement simulacra and so forth. And what is a background without a gure anyway, a derelict abstraction? What’s more, they claim neutrality, radical emptiness, hyper- atness, full of unawareness to your distinct corporeal present-ness. They demand, they take, they absorb; they also want to be beheld despite their structural indifference like a 17th Century still-life. However, they have no being, no ontology because they have no signature, no author. The scene they present is nowhere, blank, nugatory and like their materiality and shape, they are alien perfection, they inhabit total placeless-ness. Bourgeois trompe-l’oeil...again. And what about their meaning, their ‘aboutness’? Does their negativity totally negate meaning, and if not, what does this operation actually produce, what does it capture and what does it return?

Despite these queries you are keen and unwittingly subsumed, the glory of this encounter pervades your mind, the riches of the event promise so much:

Them: ‘Lie to me, tell me you’ve been waiting for me all these years’.

You: ‘Avec plaisir’.

Them: ‘How unfortunate that you won’t be present for this happiness’.

Simon Thompson & Ed Atkins

Photo Waste

19 February – 19 March 2016