Nothing to see explores the idea of proximity as a quality that inhabits all relationships; person-to-person, art-to-audience, past-to-present, physical-to-spiritual. However within the confines of the white cube audiences rarely get the opportunity to do more than simply look. . The ‘viewer’ is encouraged to stand, a passive receiver, their relationships to the artwork is rarely challenged.

This exhibition asks viewers to consider further sensorial engagements with the artwork. How might the experience of encountering art change if the artwork were to encourage a more active spectatorship?
The ideas surrounding this exhibition are charged with the potential of unity and the potential of separation. It is erotic, it is comforting, it is awkward. Our project aims to suggest alternate methods of viewing through a curated encounter which leads the audience down a sensorial path of experience, should they wish to follow it. Beyond the physical, proximity is empathy, is transmission. Invoked through sound and memory, proximity is layered through experience and anticipation. These ideas are elements we aim to platform through our project.

Nothing to see involves the full human sensorium, which allows for a multi-layered sensorial experience – an experience where the viewer can become one with the artwork. Our project gathers artists for whom the art encounter is more than an intellectual activity. Comprised of individuals who express, utilise, challenge, or disrupt the nature of proximity within their art – we aim to re-awaken the audience awareness of their presence and importance within the art encounter.

This exhibition will focus on practices that create a physical encounter between the viewer and the work. It will communicate without explanation or the use of narrative. Using tactile and sensory materials and media the audience will be able to touch, feel and hear the art . The viewer will experience the work.

Working beyond the limits of language the exhibition plays with a fluid restless idea of memory. A changing entity that cannot be consigned to the past as it is affected by past present and future circumstances, happenings, needs and desires. The residue of memory leaves us with fragments and impressions/imprints to flighty and elusive to communicate to others.

This group will focus on communicating what would typically be beyond the forms of language and representation by creating work that portrays a feeling, response or residue from a memory or experience.reality, memory, trauma, hauntings, permanence vs flux, time, deterioration and distortion; the complexities of layers of time, memory, past, present and future and the interweaving of them all.

‘Sense memory is about tapping into a certain kind of process experienced not as a remembering of the past but as a continuous negotiation of present with indeterminable links to the past. The poetics of sense memory involve not so much speaking of but speaking out of a particular memory or experience…’ – Jill Bennett

‘Memory is clearly no longer the faculty of having recollections: it is the membrane which,…makes sheets of past and layers of reality correspond, the first emanating from an inside …, the second arriving from an outside always to come, the two gnawing at the present which is now only their encounter’ – Gilles Deleuze