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George Turner: Towards Equilibrium
George Turner: Towards Equilibrium
July 2, 2022 @ 10:00 am – August 3, 2022 @ 4:00 pm
Towards Equilibrium impels viewers to attend to the causes and environmental effects of both settler-colonial land conversion and current land development in Aotearoa. With numerous present examples of human interests encroaching on natural spaces, Turner’s work teases out the relationship between our illusions of wilderness and the actual state of it.
It is often difficult to grasp the scale of ecological collapse as it takes place incrementally, at a rate slow enough for humans to adjust to new norms over a single lifetime. Outside of increasingly extreme weather events such as wildfires or tsunamis, the deterioration of environments such as waterways or native forest can go largely unnoticed, with mitigation efforts lacking any sense of urgency.
Combining research and virtual technology, Turner renders the historic and current destruction of specific sites at a speed more suited to human attention spans. For instance, ‘An Uncertain Marsh’ (2022) is a 10-minute panoramic animation of one of Aotearoa’s most degraded environments; the wetland. Employing geographical data, AI and computer-generated forms, Turner re-inserts the imagery missing from our common idea of landscape. Presenting ecological collapse at a speed and format more attractive to modern audiences, Towards Equilibrium promotes the notion of collective responsibility over individual guilt; shrinking the time and space which allows our shared impact to go unnoticed.
About the Artist
Extended across a multitude of practices, Turner’s work has consistently traversed an ecological narrative with the desire to unpack aspects of trauma still rooted in Aotearoa. From large scale projections, Virtual Reality, Artificial Intelligence, and across all of the digital disciplines their work presents a digital analysis of this contemporary world, openly reflecting on the scale of mass extinction taking place. Over the past few years, Turner has exhibited between Wellington and Auckland, steadily developing a practice which tackles environmental destruction.
As well as their own practice, Turner has assisted artist Lisa Reihana on some of their recent works including ‘Ihi’, shown in the landmark exhibition Toi Tū Toi Ora: Contemporary Māori Art (2021) and more recently ‘The Battle’ as part of the Aotearoa Festival of Arts. 2022 has seen Turner invited to participate in the first trans-Tasman digital artist fellowship which brings together artists from a wide range of mediums, with the intent of developing each other’s practices. Towards Equilibrium is the amalgamation of this fellowship and Turner’s continued practice.