TD 1
ARTSDESK NEW ENERGY A chance observation by a rel
ative sparked the idea behind the latest work of Mexican artist Gabriel Kuri. words Jack O’Higgins photos Louis Haugh We’ve all gone to some pretty extreme measures to save money on the heating bill; after all, there’s a reason why the Irish mammy obsessing over the immersion being left on is a meme in and of itself. But when a family member came to visit Brussels based sculptor Gabriel Kuri, he discovered a cost-cutting measure that soared past extreme and into the absurd. “We have a relative who is very tight with money,” explains Kuri. “And once he came to our apartment and said, ‘Ah, I can’t believe how you can live with such high ceilings! I would put up a sheet of plastic and save on energy!’” While Kuri didn’t go to his nearest hardware store to try lower his ceiling, the idea percolated in the back of his mind. When he was invited by the Oakville Gallery in Toronto to create a new exhibition in collaboration with The Douglas Hyde Gallery, he saw an opportunity to exercise this bizarre concept. Now the exhibition, spending static to save gas, makes its way to Dublin for what Kuri considers chapter two of the show. Like most of the Trinity art block, The Douglas Hyde Gallery is a prime example of brutalist architecture. Angular concrete walls combine with huge open spaces to make an imposing room. This makes Kuri’s centerpiece, a DIY static shield that halves the gallery ceiling, even more of a deliciously absurd proposition to those familiar with the space. “When I first saw the gallery, I thought they would have a very high consumption of energy because of the anatomy of the space,” Kuri says. “Of course, this is a little bit of an exercise in futility, because we invested nearly all of the budget of the exhibition in creating this device that in the end, is going to save only a little bit of money. But part of this meditation is trying to think about whether sculpture is an act of adding, or if maintaining is also a way of making sculpture.” There’s a rich vein of irony running through the project; after all, it costs almost as much money as it will ‘save’ and Kuri would be the first to admit he’s not proposing any kind of viable environmental solution. To my mind, the static shield reflects our own society’s obsession with ‘practical’ technological progress, even when it becomes far more unwieldy and unintuitive than simply changing our day-to-day actions. Dotting the panels of the static shield are the assorted remnants of lives lived; cigarette butts, discarded pennies, dead moths. “I kind of, tongue-in-cheek, say that I don’t know how these things ended there, they just accumulated. But it’s sort of the debris that you would find on top of a dropped ceiling or behind a false wall. It’s funny that very often you wouldn’t be able to explain how they got there. “I’m constantly driven to comment on these traces that I think are part of the sculpture of everyday life. I think rather than things neatly and purposefully lying in the middle of a very precisely lit environment, sculpture is about a lot more than that. There’s a lot in the incidental 70