KARL GRIMES
Future Nature

Future Nature opens on Friday the 8th of February 2002, 8.30pm and runs until March 24th 2002.

5th @ Guinness Storehouse is pleased to announce the new exhibition, Future Nature, by Karl Grimes. The work, consisting of large scale photographic prints, light boxes and video.

In "Future Nature", Karl Grimes continues his analytical engagement with the themes of retrieval and resurrection - bringing to light and into the light the objects and specimens previously hidden in dispersed archives and research databanks. The exhibition takes as its content the unique animal embryos and foetuses housed in the collections of the Hubrecht Laboratory, Utrecht, Netherlands, and the Tornblad Institute, Lund, Sweden.

"Future Nature" stands as both requiem and genesis. The mode of display and artifice transform this collection of embryos, collapsing their past into a timeless, liminal, ambivalent space - where they are constantly on the verge of becoming... yet frozen in time. This is the paradox throughout: a fantasy future of Disney-world displays, of long-extinct creatures, or perhaps of those which never came into being. Captured in a state of grace, the images invite us to view and enter a contemplative mode - where colour and large scale render them both close-up yet distant, creating an allegorical world where death and immortality are present[ed] in living colour.

His photographic portraiture is deployed to imagine future menageries - or are they from the past? At times the highly colourful carnival of animals evokes comforting and nightmarish fairy-tale images - the common opossum, the nosey mammal or the spiny dogfish - with their anthropomorphic allure through details of gesture and expression. This gallery of animals, photographed in their glass jars, simultaneously recalls science museum displays as well as subverting those same conventions through the use of intense light, scale and staging. "Future Nature" reworks and undermines notions of scientific and clinical objectivity - eschewing conventionally cold, monochromatic tones in favour of a vibrant colour palette and a sumptuous mise-en-scene.

Grimes's past exhibitions have consistently sought to explore newperspectives on medical and scientific matters. The controversial Still Life, first shown at the Gallery of Photography, Dublin, in 1998, presented images of neonatal human malformations from Italian medical collections. R Block, exhibited at the Hudson iver Museum and at Nikolai Fine Art, New York, in 1999, explored the visual codes and conventions of medical pathology portraiture and imaging. Stuffed Histories, shown at Nikolai Fine Art, New York, in 2000, re-presented in a series of mural images the three-dimensional environments of the animal dioramas at the American Museum of Natural History, New York.

"Future Nature" is a further take on histories and narratives of science. Grimes challenges our assumptions about how we aestheticise nature - questioning how nature and scientific processes are made available for public consumption. By dealing with the stuff and matter of science in his practice, he invites us to reconsider the interfaces between art and science and creates a rich visual currency in this exchange.

Karl Grimes was born in Dublin and studied Photography and Media at New York University, graduating with an M.A in Fine Art. His work has been exhibited and published in the United States and Europe and is represented in a number of international collections. He currently lectures on photography and new media at Dublin City University and is represented in New York by Nikolai Fine Art.

Future Nature is curated by Paul Murnaghan.

C-Prints, Lightboxes & Video. Dimensions of 6ft x 4ft (183 x 122cm), 36 x 24 in (92 x 61cm). 2002.

More information: Isobel Egan, Artistic Coordinator @ 5th