Pushed

Chambers Fine Art is pleased to announce the opening on February 22, 2014 of Marcos Lutyens: Pushed. In this body of work, created specifically in Beijing for Chambers Fine Art, Marcos Lutyens explores the impact that texts, SMS’s and push notifications have on our psyche. Our lives have become kaleidoscopic as so many impressions converge on us, collapsing distance and space into the palm of our hand. As each pusharrives, in a given sequence, a dopamine rush is released generating a cycle of search and reward. 

The works in the exhibition include pushed ‘Cycles’: on a raw, concrete-like canvas background, push notifications from Twitter, What’s App, WeChat and other app’s generate a parametric system of drips as the canvas slowly rotates. The color-coded drips converge in a slow centripetal movement and create complex patterns of associations, just as the succession of pushes that we receive on our ‘phones drive unconscious dopamine and opioid loops that lie somewhere between obsession and addiction. In this way, the canvasses become a mirror to the subconscious emotional processes that are unleashed in our bodies throughout the day.

At the opening of the exhibition on February 22, a live performance by the artist, ‘Pacemaker’, brings this cadence of pushes into the gallery in real time, as each notification chime triggers a sequence of events that transform sound into a visual display, externalizing and ritualizing a process that is usually experienced internally and individually. There will be further live demonstrations every Saturday afternoon between 3 and 4pm during the exhibition.

‘Circatextian’, a film in the project room, replaces our natural circadian rhythms with a phase resetting process, as each time a chime is heard and felt, it is matched by a flash of light which is processed by brightness receptors in the eye, thus entraining us to a new type of clock tuned to the pushes instead of our night/day cycle.

Marcos Lutyens is an intermedia artist who has exhibited and performed internationally, including at Documenta 13, LACMA, MOCA, the Pompidou Centre, the Royal Academy, the Venice Biennale. He has often worked with various tools and approaches to explore the unconscious and associated schema.

At Documenta, Lutyens completed 340 hypnosis performances over a 100 day period in a specially designed cabin. Lutyens engaged in experiments with Dr. V. S. Ramachandran, Director of the Center for Brain and Cognition, at the University of California, San Diego to explore the brain's neural pathways in the synesthetic mind. His work with the mind has lead him to develop events and exhibits that reflect research with specific social or ethnic groups such as the Muxhe, from the Zapotec culture in Southern Mexico. Building on his investigations into consciousness and social dynamics, Lutyens has worked on large scale projects that involve interactivity, the environment and new technologies. Works include external and internal data tracking and brain wave monitoring that are generally invisible to the casual observer, and yet as important to us as the subjective processes of the inner mind.

His work is held in public and private collections of note around the world, including Inhotim, the Dena Foundation and the Documenta Archive.