Exhibition curated by Ivo Pacheco & Linnea Skoglosa

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Text by Günseli Yalcinkaya

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A car is on course for collision with an oncoming train. A wild animal is caught in the headlights. This is what we see when we enter Conor Ackhurst’s debut solo exhibition “Crumple Zone”. As the viewer walks down the stairs, the scene that they encounter is one of transformation. The viewer themselves is a witness, passing between wall-based sculptures and paintings with frames upholstered in automotive seat cloth, and through the narrow passage between the train and car. A scrap metal sculpture sits in the middle of the room, its form, crushed up and compressed, is reimagined into a deadfall trap, the splayed steel frame mirroring its own entrapment. A plastic cherry pendant dangles from the jack, totally untouched, and seemingly at odds, with its surroundings. As the viewer, I can’t help but make the connection between its past and present form; the smell of burnt rubber and asphalt runs circles in my imagination as I map out the chain of events that could have led to such transformation.

 

To enter the Crumple Zone is to step into the space between events, the suspense of what's to come or has yet to be seen. The exchange between an anonymous individual and a car, the transits of multiple bodies at that point in which everything blurs into abstraction, where the relief of impact is always slightly out of reach. Each work in the show cycles into one another. The societal crumples into the individual, which crumples into the spiritual and the collective. The gap between each constitutes the eponymous zone as a constant exchange of flows and desires. Nothing is real, everything is potential, which is to say that we are all subject to potential change, and therefore collisions of some kind. As we shift the gears between reality settings, of temporal zones and material world restrictions, it becomes clear to me that we are all in between states. All this entropy is dizzying, but what can we do except close our eyes and brace for impact.