Recombinant Histories

Rob Swainston
Friday, August 1st - Sunday, August 31st, 2008

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

Rob Swainston’s work crosses from print and paper into sculpture and installation. With a background in history and sociology as well as the visual arts, Swainston tends to work large and in multiples. Drawing his model from social processes, Swainston is constantly rebuilding and reassembling work while adding new components and destroying old. This process is analogous to how our social world is constructed.

For this show at Vox, Rob started with a found object — huge unwieldy steel display rack. Immediately, he envisioned this strsucture interwoven with paper, as a sort of representaton of history. He says, “History is neither linear or cyclical, but rather unfolding and refolding in a convoluted mass—a mobius strip.” The found structure is woven and layered with long strips of woodblock prints. The works on paper featured in the piece have been fragmented from their original incarnations to be assembled in a cryptic pattern representing the fragmented narrative code of failed social movements.