Something of the universe’s unruliness, its filthy playful accident is
rather more manifest in The Crystal World exhibition by Martin Howse,
Ryan Jordan and Jonathan Kemp recently on at the Space White Building.
Titled after J.G. Ballard’s novel of encroaching strangeness, here the
earth is transformed into a gigantic grunge chemistry set. The chemist
Dmitri Mendeleev famously found the final proportions of the periodic
table in a dream after much intense work of experiment and calculation,
and something similar is going on here. The exhibition proposes intense
links between matter, abstraction and the fantastic, the combination of
computation, accident and intuition. In the periodic table, matter
proceeds along two axes with a gradually changing set of qualities
arranged by atomic weight and atomic number, (a quality added later
following work by Henry Moseley) changing in terms of conductivity,
malleability, the ability to react with or combine with other materials
and so on. The whole table, with each change arising from the accretion
of one electron at a time, formulates, at a certain scale of analysis,
all of the abundant expressivity of matter arising from what Mendeleev
called the invisible world of chemical atoms.
Read more
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Article by Martin Howse and Jonathan Kemp
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wiki
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