ART CITIES:Dublin-Yuri Pattison

Yuri Pattison’s work explores the multiple relationships between visual cultures, space, communication technologies and information circulation. While digital economies favor the ideology of mobility and the weightlessness of cloud technology as systems of reference, Yuri Pattison, who is the winner of the 2016 Frieze London Artist Award, aims to visualise the Internet’s political and social associations from a physical perspective.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Mother’s Tankstation Limited Archive

Spanning sculpture, video, photography and websites, often juxtaposed or dispersed, Pattison’s work employs data and metadata, along with a mixture of factual materials, archival sources and historical fragments, to construct complex narratives with fictional scripts that lean towards conspiracy theory and science fiction. Following Yuri Pattison’s installation, “user, space”, at Chisenhale Gallery, London, “sunset provision”, at mother’s tankstation limited, is his first solo exhibition in Ireland, it enacts a tangential second chapter, developing his evocative ideas which orbit a particularly vital aspect of the contemporaneous live-work experience: sleep. The installation reveals a growing niche that promises you will never need be lonely. Here, Pattison isolates a particularly curious strain of interest in conquering the loneliest hours of day, creating proxy companions to help consumers through the few hours when no one can reach you; probing the developed market in recent years of monitoring applications and interfaces, sound emitters, and contouring foam, promising to both optimise and accompany your (literal) darkest time. The combination of survival and sleep, tension and release, is perhaps best exemplified through Silicon Valley’s casual terminology for killing a start-up: “sunsetting”. Sunsetting is a well worn procedure by which a technology company is acquired for its one fundamental and valuable component. This component is extracted for use by the parent company in multiple products, while the host company is put to sleep (sunsetted). Pattison’s interest in the bi-annual solar event MIThenge, popularised in the ‘70s by a poster design by Tom K. Norton, a moment in which the sun aligns with the path of what is known as the “Infinite Corridor” at MIT. Sunlight floods the campus’ longest corridor as students gather in a ritualistic manner. For this installation, Pattison collaborated with Misha Sra to capture the event.

Info: mother’s tankstation limited, 41-43 Watling Street, Usher’s Island, Dublin, Duration: 16/11/16-21/1/17, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 12:00-18:00, www.motherstankstation.com