- Taylor Hall
Ever-present and constantly revisited, routines and rituals bring purpose to our twenty-four hours, subsequently gaining our day a sense of structure by performing actions with the anticipation that they will be performed again in the next. We have all experienced the humdrum of daily routine slipping us into a cosy, familiar place, because at its essence, routine produces a sense of familiarity and comfort that we believe we can control. There are simply too many options in a day and these possibilities, despite being on the surface idealistic, can be overwhelming and chaotic. It’s by performing cyclical tasks that our minds connect more purposefully with the materiality of our bodies and a sense of familiarity becomes concrete within this perpetual cycle.
It’s undeniable the importance of routine and ritual amongst our rapidly changing zeitgeist, now more than ever we are leaning on these habits to give us solace in a time of universal uncertainty (whatever happened to precedented times?). In their latest online exhibition Ether, Concrete Circle acknowledges the importance of these routines and rituals cemented in our daily lives. Offering up the digital realm as a site of connection and collaboration, Ether contemplates routine and ritual as a reflection of the individual, delving into the psychology of what constitutes ‘the familiar’ for certain bodies and how this gains the audience a ‘peek’ into their psyche.
In her work Quiz (2020) Zara Rose Dudley attempts to comprehend her own relationship with the internet. By surrendering her usual fascination of the tactility of embedded and imbued objects, Zara’s materiality becomes her own consciousness and its tactility is her (and by proxy the audience’s) online navigation. Through highlighting the intersection of her womanhood within the digital realm, Zara toys with the idea of connection and recalibration being both deeply emotional and intrinsically linked to the web. Furthering her interest in our indebtedness to the internet, Quiz evokes nostalgic memories of routinely completing viral online tests and aimlessly searching the web for answers to convoluted relationship issues (‘does a break really mean it’s the end?’, ‘does he love me?’, ‘how do I know he is cheating?), both attempting to provide a newfound sense of clarity and identity for the participant. By navigating through her work, the audience is left with a sense of partly understanding the artist as an individual as well as viewing her as an enigma of feminine mystique.
Similarly, artist Isabella Catenaro utilises the familiarity of internet culture in their interactive gamer-style artwork esc (2020). Understanding the digital realm as a place to potentially reinvent oneself, esc positions the audience as an anonymous ‘scroll’ alias on a perpetual journey in its melancholic and wistful digital environment. By rewarding the audience’s engagement with the artwork in the form of progressing forward in the constructed micro-utopia, Isabella explores how performing the act of play generates the content of the artwork. By giving the audience a choice in their participation (or potentially lack thereof) and subjecting them to the confinement of set rules and paths, esc blurs the borders of control and autonomy within routine.
Grappling with the inherent preconceived context of materials, Nicholas Tossmann asked himself ‘what is the most direct way I can make an artwork as an artist?’. On that strain of thought, Mindmap Artwork (2020) utilizes as its substance the body of the artist as a representation of being in a perpetual cycle of practice and creation. With handwritten text scrawled across the page, the hand of the artist is found amongst the digital realm and hints at a state of permanency beyond its webpage. By scrolling the seemingly endless and quite meta mind map of a mind map, the viewer is forced to jump back and forward in the artist’s stream of consciousness. The jarring experience speaks to not only an audience’s fascination with the routine of the artistic process, but our vague understanding of when an artwork solidifies itself as complete.
Contrary to the fast-paced nature of the digital, Trinity Koch asks her audience to meditate on an earthly, ethereal presence contained within her artwork’s Esbat (2020) and Luna (2020). Exploring time and its passing in relation to the moon and its cycles, Trinity focuses on the rituals and routines involved within witchcraft and the Wiccan celebration of Esbat. Conjuring ideas surrounding the body, the earth and the moon, Trinity highlights the potency of the natural world in ways that are bodily and visceral yet also intangible.
As the art world now tentatively transitions online, Ether stands as a relevant reflection on what was and still is existent in our daily lives despite drastic change. Every day we have the choice to reacquaint ourselves with practices that provide meaning and motive to our existence, a subconscious exercise that has been imbued within the human psyche since the dawn of time. As Concrete Circle artists’ teeter between binarism’s of relinquishing and seizing control and engaging verses escaping, Ether as an exhibition signifies and deconstructs the reoccurring routine of exhibiting and both the artist and audience’s place within it.