By Allegra Pacheco and Mark Harwood
What divides the self from its creations?
Does nature function as a machine? Does reality? How does our perception of reality shape reality itself?
Micro Macro, artist Allegra Pacheco's new work presented in Londonewcastle Project Space, is a bold investigation into questions of self, identity and structure both the internal and external presented as an exploration of the symbiosis of all matter, the organic and the inanimate.
Radical shifts in science and technology are re-directing the traditional sense of self and order of the surrounding environment. Arms can be printed at home, glasses can record everything we observe. If all our movements and thoughts are backed-up on hardware and our bodies start to wear these machines it becomes more difficult to discern the gap between the master and the tool.
The works on display deal with a mixture of hand and machine crafted wares, as Pacheco stands by the notion that our capacity to make and create is what shapes our environment and is intrinsically what makes us human.
“It is the making of art that acts as an anchor to our physical reality” states Pacheco.
Compared with the perfection of the machine assembled, craft and manual labor stand out as an emblem of human individuality. Flaws are intrinsically human and are one of the keystones that divide us from machines.
Micro Macro shows a mixture of hand-crafted and machine-made work which coexist in a symbiotic dialogue. Texture alongside attention to detail and the inevitable human error are present and welcome. Objects, which we associate as machine made are hand-made, and vice versa, common conceptions are turned upside-down. Hand crafted rugs look like psychedelic fur on one side and a microchip on the other; our parameters of what is “normal” are tested in a playful and inviting manner, full of possibility, yet not ignoring the reality that holds the concepts behind them together.
In Pacheco’s work the specimens depicted evoke thoughts of amputated digital limbs, partially dead, vivisected and displayed. The grid, a skin, mixed with the underbelly of the structure’s torso act as relics of a digital bi-product-the remains of a post-human landscape.
The lack of scale and context in the works make the viewer ask his or herself; Is this a section of a mega-structure? Or a miniaturized limb from a digital bug?
Ambiguity is key to the cubic volumes depicted as the unresolved invites an open interpretation and asserts it’s own force from the discomfort of the unsettled narrative. The structures depicted serve as an abstraction of human achievement and follie; unpalatable and ambiguous, they are the remains of a no longer pulsating system.