exhibition

Half Life

Artists Max Attenborough, Christopher Davies, Richard Ducker, Lee Holden, Caroline List, Gavin Nolan, Terry Smith, Isabel Young

23.Jun.06 - 16.Jul.06
Fri-Sun 1-6

Fieldgate Gallery
14 Fieldgate Street
London E1 1ES
07957 228 351
fieldgategallery@gmail.com
www.fieldgategallery.com
Tube Aldgate East, Whitechapel, Spitalfields / Brick Lane

Max Attenborough, Christopher Davies, Richard Ducker, Lee Holden, Caroline List, Mat Humphrey, Gretta Marchant, Gavin Nolan, Terry Smith, Isabel Young

Radioactive decay rates are normally stated in terms of their half-lives, and the half-life of a given nuclear species is related to its radiation risk. The different types of radioactivity lead to different decay paths which transmute the nuclei into other chemical elements. The radioactive half-life for a given radioisotope is the time for half the radioactive nuclei in any sample to undergo radioactive decay. After two half-lives, there will be one-fourth the original sample, after three half-lives, one-eighth the original sample, and so forth.

This exhibition address a notion of decay where each artist appears to represent it at different stages before entropy takes over. However hard it tries, art will always struggle to capture the present and is therefore left playing catch-up. These artists exploit this state of affairs by exploring differing points of decay: half lives from moments that have passed, ideologies lost. They reveal a world of physical or emotional instability, exploiting surface corruption to expose psychological wounds. Paint can either exquisitely open a world of illusion, while illusion can state an ugly opposite. Materials elegantly evoke a fading memory or are assembled with precarious balance.

There is also a biological half life: the time required for half the quantity of a drug or other substance deposited in a living organism to be metabolized or eliminated by normal biological processes. Here at the beginning, there is the possibility of elation and intoxication, at least before the process of the hangover begins. The exhibition reveals a world caught at various stages of transition from one state to another, in flux, and on the edge of collapse.