No Noise

The Agency is pleased to present No Noise a group exhibition of three
international artists with three different conceptual approaches, brought
together by the imposed scheme of Black and White. It is a response
to strands within the artists’ work, which reference a response to strands
within the artists’ work, which reference minimalism, deconstruction
and textual approaches as a method of creating works. By removing the
element of colour from all their usual practices the show becomes a grid
and the work within it a cipher. No Noise is the white noise of the analogue
broadcast or the digital scramble, in which information is embedded
and can be found if sought.

Kevin Hunt constructs sculpture utilising the redundant; particularly
furniture, which is reconfigured into linear and increasingly minimal
works that balance or are propped precariously.  Placed in fragile equilibrium,
transformative processes such as burning, resulting in darkly monolithic
objects, mutably teetering on the edges of two and three dimensions.
Elegantly scaling the height of the ceiling with their thin ‘Brancusiesque’
limbs these works playfully tamper with the poetics of the found form,
exposing an inherent geometric beauty that has always lay within whilst
questioning the capacity of such objects as they come to exist as sculpture.

Dan Miller reworks the territory of ratio and repetition, where painting’s
sign-like vocabulary is disabled; superseded by a cipher. Symmetrical
compositions of dots, lines and polygons float on an x/y axis, the grid
providing a skeletal underpinning for pictorial and chromatic arrangement.
Painterly depth, created by barely visible layers of ‘interference’ acrylic,
characterise Miller’s two-tone works. Through these acts of delineation
Miller’s work renders apparent a function of reading that exists between
the production and reception of an artwork, a process defined the production
and reception of an artwork, a process defined by encryption and deciphering.

Are Blytt takes on minimalism by removing painting entirely from the
canvas, dyeing cloth to mimic the tonality of branded book covers such as
the German sheet music company Henle. Discovering a new form of hedonism
in this game of white on white, he creates white drawings in white frames on
white sheaths of canvas, bearing only stains as message. Fascinated by logos
and text, Blytt’s work has abandoned the message and replaced it with a
considered stutter, a conversational trace.

The show plays with codes of minimalism, the works scattered like attempts
of creating meaning with little regard for the outcome, a silent conversation,
no noise..

Text by Bea de Souza, director of The Agency Contemporary (2011)