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Clockwise from main: chart, 2020, smoke drawing o
n wall, and spending static to save gas, 2020, installation with dropped ceiling and mixed media; A window in the gallery; moth wings positive and negative, 2020, plexiglass, wooden crate with customised CNC cut thermally insulated foam, fibreglass, aluminium; and irish heating bill, 2020, paper, insulating material, stainless steel-plated epoxy resin, mixed media, wooden crate with thermally insulated foam, fibreglass and aluminium; error bars, 2020, paper, PVC, wood, mixed media, wooden crate with customised CNC cut thermally insulated foam, fibreglass and aluminium All works courtesy of the artist and Esther Schipper, Berlin Gabriel Kuri’s spending static to save gas is in Gallery One of the Douglas Hyde Gallery until Saturday March 28 that I think tells me more about the nature of sculpture than, let’s say, the more conventional and canonical way.” In addition to the dropped ceiling, Kuri has also altered the make-up of the gallery with smoke drawings that snake along the walls of the gallery, created by burning sheets of paper printed with figures that relate to the logistics of the dropped ceiling and the estimated cut of the energy bill. To Kuri, it was important that all these figures were correct before they were used to scorch the gallery walls. “But again, all this information becomes just stuff. And that’s another commentary that I want to make in light of this being an exercise in futility. You go to these lengths to find something that, in the end, becomes background music. Or a necessary step that you needed to take in order to muffle it or ignore it, just to see what was on the other side.” I suggest to him that in the internet age, the sheer volume of information available about the ramifications of our actions can become paralyzing. “Yes, and where do you draw the line? Of how much you feel you’re in control of the consequences of whatever it is that you do. Your choices are enabled by a series of conditions, and all these have consequences too, so where do you draw the line in order to be able to move forward? Unfortunately, some of the consequences our lives have are not the most welcome, or ones you would feel proud about.” Tying the exhibition together are four sculptures in the center of the space. Presented in thermally insulated wooden cases, the sculptures are pristine, with each piece sitting snuggly in foam, or resting carefully on the cases. Kuri wanted the works to feel like kits, ready to be deployed in any art space. Rather than making some statement about art coming pre-packaged, the utilitarian nature of the sculptures is very much part of the appeal for him. Objects found on the ceilings are magnified in the four sculptures; cigarette butts become a foot long. Moth wings are made out of huge pieces of plexiglass. But to Kuri, there’s no symbolism behind the scale. “Experience is something that is vast, like staring out the window. And then we have to extract that experience and code it into the language, and the plasticity of the form. And, of course, there’s something that happens with scale, and I don’t know what it is, I don’t think I could define it in quantitative terms. But this is why I think enlarging or reducing is well within the nature of abstraction.” “I think that there is a lot of eloquence in the normality of life, if you’re in the right mode and you’re able to perceive and re-create it,” he continues. “That is the type of experience I’d like to convey in my work. And though that familiarity, I would like to connect with the audience. That’s probably the hardest thing, I want my work to have that immediacy.” 71