reasonable & senseless: a technical disaster

reasonable & senseless
A Technical Disaster?
Artists Propose a Fool’s Hope

Opens May 27

“Of course the Hindenberg exploded,” says artist Donna Szoke. “How could it have done otherwise? Why do we call a technical disaster an accident? It isn’t a magical event - it is a product of human fallibility.” In the exhibition reasonable & senseless: a technical disaster, three Canadian artists confront the seduction and terror of technological disasters, pharmacological madness, and ecological mayhem. But rather than accept geopolitical despair, Michael Alstad, Donna Szoke and K.D. Thornton offer a fool's hope. The artists will be in attendance at the opening reception on Friday, May 27, 7pm.

Viewed on 20 miniature LCD monitors, Donna Szoke’s video installation, reasonable & senseless, presents a history of technical disasters including methodologies such as ‘duck and cover’ - taught to children in anticipation of a nuclear war. Szoke says, “Reason, when cut off from our hearts and souls, is a dangerous tool: it is literally sense-less. Often, in the name of reason we make gravely bad choices. Educational, advertising and promotional films delineate a culture’s values, omissions and biases. By looking at the past we have an opportunity to refresh the lens through which we see the present.”

K.D. Thornton’s installation, Dairy, includes seven ordinary plastic milk jugs that appear to emit a sinister and mysterious glow. Created during an ‘orange terrorist alert’ in the US, this work is inspired by technologies such as ultraviolet light, used to process our food to make it ‘safe’ for consumption. Thornton says, “We can never really be completely confident that the products and processing practices of today are not the scandalous tragedies of tomorrow. The very idea that water systems, or common necessities are vulnerable to contamination strikes fear into our hearts, creating heightened stress and tension in times of instability.” Her other work, Fear, uses a software program that searches for the frequency that technical disasters are written about online. A monitor shows a website documenting the results of this ongoing search accompanied by an audio response.

Our complicity in global warming is explored in Michael Alstad’s interactive video installation MELT. Melting of the polar ice cap will disrupt ocean currents that govern climate around the world. Visitors will view a ‘satellite’s eye’ image of the cracking and melting of the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf, and eventually see an image of themselves merge with the projection of the Arctic’s topography. Alstad says, “In an era when anyone accessing Google satellite views can zoom into remote areas and witness the results of excess greenhouse gas emissions on Earth’s topography, the threat of an encroaching ecological disaster becomes abstract and visually mesmerizing. Although technology facilitates our geospatial knowledge, the ‘disaster’ is perceived as something separate from ‘here’, as though only imagined. With MELT my intention is to transport the viewer into a space where ‘there’ and ‘here’ converge.”

The Surrey Art Gallery is located at 13750 - 88 Avenue, 1 block east of King George Hwy., Surrey, BC. Ph: 604-501-5566 or www.arts.surrey.ca