Human Connection
Joint show with Seo Young-Deok
Opera Gallery, London
2018
Opera Gallery London is proud to present Human Connection, a joint exhibition featuring the London based painter Nick Gentry and the South Korean sculptor Seo Young-Deok, exhibited for the first time together.
Article by Gilles Dyan and Sébastien Plantin for Opera Gallery
Both born in the 1980s, these two emergent artists construct fascinating portraits of anonymous individuals searching for identity in a world destabilised by increasingly relentless technological progress.
Fragments of Data
Nick Gentry and Seo Young-Deok utilise unusual, recycled materials to create their artworks. Gentry paints enigmatic portraits on floppy disks, VHS cassettes, film negatives and fragmented CD-ROMs that contain people’s memories and data.
Chain Sculptures
In Seoul, on the other side of the globe, Seo renders large-scale sculptures of the human figure from bicycle chains. This material is emblematic of the contrasting feelings of empowerment and alienation people often experience in industrialised, modern East Asian cities.
Human or Robot?
The faces that Gentry portrays are idealised, yet they express a certain degree of anxiety and discomfort in their faultlessness. They appear harmonious, yet simultaneously distant and silent.
Are they human or are they robot? Are they celebrities of the digital age or characters trapped as fictitious online personae? They appear as higher beings, perhaps perfected by plastic surgery or by genetic manipulation.
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BBC London interview with Jo Good
Technological Figures
Likewise, Seo’s sculptures magnificently reinterpret classical beauty with impressive reimaginings of the ideal human body. They can however, upon second thought and closer inspection, appear to be empty shells, soulless beings residing in an existential vacuum.
Are these sculptures human or are they machine? Are these indestructible persons, living in an ever-expanding metropolis? Or are they held captive in an industrial reality of their own making?
Industrial Digital
Opera Gallery is delighted to show these two young artists who explore the challenges and the opportunities which contemporary mankind faces in the industrial and digital world of the present.
Gentry connects people from all over the globe by visualising a collective human identity through his painting, whilst Seo reaches out to reconnect us to one another through his intricate weaving of chains.
Social Art
Despite geographical and cultural boundaries, Nick Gentry and Seo Young-Deok seem to find remedy, or at least relief from the adversities of our fast paced world in the value of social relationships. Comfort in the power of human connection.
Interview: Nick Gentry’s Human Connection
Nick Gentry talks to Artimage about finding human connection through artworks, collaborative projects and his latest exhibition.
Human Connection is a dual exhibition that features artworks by painter Nick Gentry and South Korean sculptor, Young-Deok Seo.
Gentry tells Artimage that while it would be easy to emphasise their differences - one being a sculptor and one a painter - the very spirit of the show defies this: “We are simply people experiencing the world. There is a wild freedom in that.”
Mindfulness and Mystery
Both artists use recycled materials in their artworks as a way of engaging with a sense of mindfulness, something that Gentry says both artists are inspired by.
“Mostly though, the works simply sit well together. Sometimes it’s better to just feel what appears to be a shared sense of mystery in the work, rather than try to explain it all. Maybe there is a shared energy - something unseen, perhaps related to the creative process?”
Fragments of Data from Millions of People
Gentry’s artworks use a variety of obsolete, recycled digital materials, from 35mm film negatives to video cassettes, X-ray prints and floppy discs, all of which are no longer deemed to be useful.
“There is something beautiful about the easily forgotten things around us. It’s not for me to define exactly what they represent, but I do have a close connection to them and they speak to me about the age in which we are currently living.”
Data Dust Portraits
These collected digital materials are then formed into paintings and portraits that still contain data, but no longer have the familiar forms they once had.
“I love the idea that I can reduce this mass of physical data to a cloud of luminescent, shapeless dust. There is something about the mixing process that I find fascinating. Just one painting can contain fragments of data from millions of people.”
A series of new Nick Gentry artworks created especially for the Human Connection exhibition can be found here, on Artimage.
Collaborating with the World
In order to collect all this data in its varying digital forms, Gentry’s work also involves a ‘social art project’ in which he asks for contributions from the public, from floppy disks to CDs and more.
This not only allows him to open his art up to people and help them become more involved, but he also notes that this is an interesting factor in his work when you consider how digitally connected we are.
“I love the fact that people willingly send me these objects from all over the world. That type of collaboration is one of the fantastic opportunities that this new technology has brought us."
Behold the Rhinos
As Gentry says himself, his work intrinsically questions our relationship between the natural world and the digital one.
“We are living a sort of dual existence, one in the natural world in which we evolved gradually over millions of years and the other in the digital world which has developed overnight.”
Interested in the development of technology and identity, consumerism and cyberculture, Gentry concludes that it is important to “Find a way to manage that relationship and be closer to nature.”
Conservation Charities
Which brings us on to his upcoming projects. Working with wildlife conservation charity, Tusk, Gentry created a rhino sculpture that is on public at St Pancras Station until 22 September, as part of The Tusk Rhino Trail. Separately, he is also collaborating with WWF.
Next year the artist is preparing for his first solo show in Paris.
Limited edition print with King & McGaw
Framed limited edition print available exclusively from King & McGaw