NEW WORKS by CARLOS NORONHA FEIO at IMT GALLERY, LONDON
Plant Life of the Pacific World is a controversial exhibition of delicate flower and plant forms assembled from collaged photographs of nuclear explosions. In some of the works their source material is brutally obvious, other works however are so alluringly graceful and delicately crafted that it is only when one gets up close does one realise the violence from which these images are constructed.
The majority of the collages have been classified in accordance with American botanist E. D. Merrill's book from which the exhibition takes its name. Published for military use in 1945, the book's dry classification of flora is transformed by Noronha Feio into an explosive revelry of intense, amoebic forms. Plant Life of the Pacific World defuses one of the most recognisable symbols of destruction, horror and power to create a sumptuous taxonomy combining the nuclear mutations of popular fiction, the evolutionary mutations of Darwin's Galapagos and an imagined botany of Bikini Atoll, whose use as nuclear testing grounds followed the book's publication.
At a time when the debate on copyright of audio-visual material is in the public consciousness with the consideration of the US online piracy bill, Noronha Feio's collages are also a pertinent exploration of the transformation in meaning through the reuse of imagery. Amongst the more organic structures and those that almost resemble insignia and geometric designs, the work presents a constant interplay between chaos and order, growth and organisation, the handmade and the appropriated.
Carlos Noronha Feio is a multimedia artist whose works explore cultural, local and global identities and the instability of meaning. He has exhibited and performed widely in the UK and abroad including the Whitechapel Gallery, London; the National Centre for Contemporary Art, Moscow; Navicula Artis, Saint Petersburg; Milton Keynes Gallery, Milton Keynes; Colchester Art Centre, Colchester; Abrons Art Centre, New York; Museu Nogueira da Silva, Braga; Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian and Fundação EDP in Lisbon and Centro cultural Helio Oiticica in Rio de Janeiro.
IMT Gallery is a contemporary art gallery based in East London, founded by Lindsay Friend in 2005 as IMT. The gallery exhibits emerging and established artists working across all media and specialises in installation, sound art and Polish new media art. In 2011 IMT became IMT Gallery and began representing artists alongside its exhibition programme. The gallery represents: David Burrows, Corrado Morgana, Carlos Noronha Feio, Alejandro Ospina, Plastique Fantastique, Gordon Shrigley, NaoKo TakaHashi and Mark Peter Wright.
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