The Sky's The Limit

“The Sky’s The Limit” is a term that is used when speaking of goals, dreams and achievements that reach beyond all boundaries. Here it is used literally in the opposite way: The Sky Is The Limit. There are limits to human understanding, particularly when it comes to scientific hypotheses and philosophical concepts that can neither be proven right or wrong. The exhibition explores these boundaries of comprehension. Knowledge is conveyed through epistemological models and their visual or linguistic formulation. The exhibition looks at space - in the sense of an abstract concept as much as physical quantity - as a case study, since scientific discovery, technological innovation and philosophical deconstruction have resulted in a complete collapse of conventional ideas of space.

The artworks brought together in the exhibition visualise these observations via various metaphors - from Plato's Cave to black holes. In so doing, the exhibition in turn reflects on its role as a model that investigates the limits inherent to any theory of knowledge.

Yvonne Todd’s photograph “Quaalude Eyes” of a telescope near Auckland that listens into outer space waiting for some signal to be decoded, provides the perfect image for communication and human research. Peter Robinson’s body of work “Divine Comedy”, presented at the New Zealand Pavilion at the Venice Biennial 2001, investigates the concept of nothingness. His sculpture “Inflation Theory”  is based upon Stephen Hawking’s model of a multi-shaped universe parts of which simultaneously deflate and inflate.

Against outer space, Andrew McLeod’s digital prints that overlie architectural structures with telescopic images of far-away galaxies deny the boundaries between microcosm and macrocosm. His recent print “Cave Complex II” references the philosophical considerations raised by Plato and links into the work of Raphael & Tobias Danke: The artist duo has developed a body of work that consists of sculptures, installations, drawings and books that circle around the implications of Plato’s Cave. The artists employ Plato’s allegory as a starting point for questioning exhibition spaces as spaces for perception, understanding and learning.

Concepts of spaces that stretch out regardless of all geographical, national or physical boundaries inspire David Hatcher’s work that looks upon art history, politics, philosophy and economics as entities that generate their own languages, semiotic systems and discursive spaces. For the exhibition “The Sky’s The Limit” Hatcher has conceived of a site-specific wall work, “Dimensions Variable (Albert Hofmann)”. This work is based on a quote from Hofmann’s diary referring to his first scientific experiments with the drug LSD and plays with perception - the way we visually perceive the world around us. Installed on the main wall of the Kunstverein it is both conceptually and visually the key piece of the exhibition and leads to the work of Turner-Prize nominee Fiona Banner who explores the limits of language and communication. Her sculpture and drawing series “Full Stops”, blown-up punctuation marks, open linguistic gaps that need to be filled wherever these works are installed.

Daniela Brahm’s triptych “Re-Entry Capsule” draws from a design by Wernher von Braun for a space rescue vehicle. The capsules transport three famous women from a period of over 70 years into our time. Brahm references time machines and introduces a feminist discourse into the exhibition which is echoed by the highly eroticised print “Cave Complex II” by Andrew McLeod and Peter Robinson’s ironic drawing “Sarenna Lee’s Inflation Theory” - a tongue-in-cheek combination of sex and science.

The rapidly changing technological and biological parameters cause and are caused by changing cultural, social and philosophical models. An economic situation which has made the aeroplane an every-day, affordable means of transport has altered our understanding of travelling and distance, or time and geography. The digital media allow totally new forms of communication and contact - internet and news satellites made time and space on our planet collapse and have transformed physical constants into variables, while cyberspace opens up new (spatial) dimensions.

At the same degree, outer space is shrinking, with its colonisation considered and prepared. Telescopes receive radio waves from unbelievably far galaxies, while astrophysics go beyond our
 imagination with models of a universe, that is expanding out of a sub-nuclear origin and that may be subject to cycles of expansion and implosion. Concepts like parallel universes, black holes and wormholes as possible connections and gateways, as well as the no longer fixed constant of light-speed torpedo conventional concepts of outer space. On a micro-level, the idea of space as a fixed system of co-ordinates, in which every given thing can only have one place, an either here or there, is eroded by quantum physics.

Against the background of unstable theories and conflicting experience the comprehensive theory of all has long been abandoned. Instead fragments are delivered, individual aspects discussed, suggestions made. Open structures replace solid constructs, the causal chain has been broken up in favour of associative combinations.