an exhibition of 14 solo exhibitions in Art Lacuna gallery space, each viewable for 60 seconds 4 times per hour.

A Festus 2023 Project with RCA MA Sculpture, Art Lacuna and 575 Wandsworth Road  

575 Wandsworth Road is Grade II-listed Georgian terraced house, that was turned into a work of art by Kenyan born novelist and civil servant, Khadambi Asalache (1935-2006). He embellished almost every wall, ceiling and door in the house with exquisite fretwork patterns and motifs, which he hand-carved from reclaimed pine doors and floorboards found in skips. The house stands as he left it, with his painted decoration on walls, doors and floors and with rooms furnished with his handmade fretwork furniture and carefully arranged collections of beautiful and functional objects, including pressed-glass inkwells, pink and copper lustreware, postcards and his typewriter. For this project we will visit the house with House Manager  Laura Hussey and think about the way that pattern is developed over every surface to transform the space. The fretwork draws on African, Islamic, European and other traditions of ornamentation and representation, across decorative, religious, craft and art traditions. We will consider these cultural articulations of pattern, their syncopation and fusions across time and space.

Many consider pattern recognition and inductive thinking or pattern processing as the fundamental basis of most features of the human brain including intelligence, language, imagination, invention, and the belief in entities such as ghosts and gods. Pattern Processing involves the electrochemical, neuronal network-based, encoding, integration, and transfer to other individuals of perceived or mentally-fabricated patterns. Most contemporary uses of machine pattern recognition are based on artificial intelligence technology. Popular applications include speech recognition, text pattern recognition, facial recognition, movement recognition, recognition for video deep learning analysis, and medical image recognition in healthcare. We will have a discussion on the ways that pattern recognition works in the human brain and in machine intelligence with visiting speakers. We will explore the ways pattern is employed in different agendas whether with emancipatory or exclusionary implications.

After visiting 575 artists were invited to make an immersive 4 screen video installation of a one minute duration  - making 14 solo exhibitions in Art Lacuna gallery space, each viewable for 60 seconds 4 times per hour.

Visiting Wandsworth 575 was an invitation to experience the settings of a magical realism story led by its creator, Khadambi Asalache. The immersive carved-out patterns produce a whimsical atmosphere contrasting with the traditional architecture of a Georgian terraced house. At a first glance, his work might be recognised as symmetric, though a closer look turns them unpredictable, an alluring game of repetition and variation. The roughness of its making provides tangible traces of a peculiar undertaking that extended beyond its time. The objects lying in the house, in particular his book collection, hint at his passions and ad some more pieces to a mysterious puzzle only completed in each visitor’s mind. The house connected with my practice because of Asalache’s multiple influences and my focus on legacy and cultural hybridity. In this context, my response to Pattern Recognition was inspired by the set of female characters depicted in the bathroom’s panels. Accessing the magazine from which he adopted the images was moving and yet the selection remained intriguing to me. It resonated with an installation I am developing at the moment, in which three female figures aim to suggest a ‘script’, and wondered if there could be also a ‘pattern’ to be discovered among these choices. The playful video piece is the result of a collage compiling images created by Artificial Intelligence. The irregularity, in this case, is not caused by a handmade process but by the use of this ‘new’ technology, which mixes high and low-resolution images. Reiterative and changing references on historical and mythical narratives around the feminine comment on fluidity and social
constructions.


https://www.nationaltrustcollections.org.uk/place/575-wandsworth-road

https://drawingcenter.org/bookstore/books/dp149-the-clamor-of-ornament#publication_reader

https://www.artforum.com/print/202108/lynne-cooke-on-the-pattern-and-decoration-movement-86705

https://www.visible-justice.org/pattern-recognition

https://www.vulture.com/2013/01/saltz-on-inventing-abstraction-at-the-moma.html

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/patternicity-finding-meaningful-patterns/

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/265474873_Superior_Pattern_Processing_is_the_Essence_of_the_Evolved_Human_Brain 

https://un-denial.com/2018/04/14/on-superior-pattern-processing-magical-thinking-and-human-success/

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/15/technology/artificial-intelligence-google-bias.html