NICKOLAUS TYPALDOS: PARTITION

Partition, an exhibition of new work by Nickolaus Typaldos, centers on notions of confusion, obstruction and the ever-shifting relationship between power and position as they affect not only perception but also political agency.

At the heart of the show is a site-specific architectural intervention – the construction of a vinyl-covered wall that partially divides the gallery space. The geometric vinyl patterning, based on those found on the inside of security envelopes, is offset by a nearly identical vinyl pattern covering the back wall of the space. The interplay between these two optical planes is activated and altered by the relative position of the viewer as their bodies move through the space.

In this way, Typaldos might be said to draw on the idea of parallax to consider the manner in which sites of power and notions of truth are constituted and contested through the position of the viewer/agent and forces of security, territory, access and control.

In The Parallax View, philosopher Slavoj Žižek draws attention to this phenomenon for the manner in which it does not simply indicate the subjective nature of all experience, reality’s dependence on a viewer but, more than that, the manner in which it implicates the subject in a wholly material world of objects resistant to our grasp.

Within the confines of the gallery, in the alternating clash and coherence of these lines, such a material world oscillates between environment and spectacle, at once a reminder of the shifting frontiers around us and the disorientating power of politics and infotainment to ceaselessly interrupt lines of thought.

The ambiguous nature of this material world is further considered in a series of sculptural works that blur the lines between real and fake, authentic and inauthentic, material and artificial.

-Aengus Woods