Continuum Model

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Continuum Model

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Fracture (DFN) - teaser

digital animation, 32sec
music : Julian Hou

Orbis (GNSS) - teaser

digital animation, 37sec
music : Julian Hou

Continuum Model

Western Front
September 13th - October 26th 2013

Excerpt from the exhibition's brochure :

Western Front Exhibitions and Western Front Media Arts are pleased to present "Continuum Model", a solo exhibition by Vancouver-based artist Sylvain Sailly. Sailly’s practice explores contemporary information systems through the intersections of technology and sculpture, exploring industrial modes of production to inform otherwise intangible socio-economic realities.

"Continuum Model" features new digitally animated works, in concert with sculptural objects, sound works and architectural interventions. This body of work is based around the diagrams and schematics often employed by technology and resource-based industries. Working with local artists Barry Doupé, Julian Hou, and Pietro Sammarco, Sailly represents abstracted images of industrial processes through a range of technologies, creating textures both virtual and concrete. This exhibition came out of intensive research into the way in which technical and environmental processes are made visible and accessible by governments, educational institutions and corporations. These images are both idealized and simplified, seductive and reductive, and point to complex slippages in representation between the virtual and the actual.

Sailly has taken diagrammatic images of two technical systems that are ubiquitous yet abstract — global navigation satellite systems and hydraulic fracturing— as source material. "Orbit (GNSS)" depicts the twenty-four satellites needed to orient objects moving across the planet’s surface for both military and civilian purposes, while "Fracture (DFN)" illustrates the waves of hydraulic liquid that permeate the earth’s crust, to extract natural gas. Sailly’s luminous animations and surrounding sculptures evoke industrial promotional materials, implicating viewers in an intimate vision that ultimately do not provide a deeper understanding of these powerful systems.

photo documentation : Maegan Hill-Caroll
from left to right