Lurking at the Threshold
Nathan Babet
12 May - 16 May 2015
Opening Night Tuesday 12 May 2015, 5-7pm
‘The future is but the obsolete in reverse.’ (Nabokov, Lance, 1952)
The modern world is turning toxic – connected yet oddly disconnected. In this context, the West’s earlier affiliation with nature appears all the more foreign. We yearn for the primal, the pagan, the tangible, the actual; dream of what was before the mechanical, pre- and post-industrial, seeking a past in which individual once had primacy. Has Western society abandoned a utopian vision of the future to return to nature, in the age of information technology and ‘speculative’ futures?
Lurking at the Threshold explores the premise that the future is evermore overshadowed by its past, to return to an apparent yearning for nature and the material. It interrogates the past as an atemporal present within a fantastical, mythological and fictitious narrative framework. Informed by an engagement with the Gothic, it investigates a ‘European indigeneity’ underpinned by nature.
Image: Nathan Babet, 'Dreams and Fancies – Wilder Mann at Dawn', 2014, HD video, 16:9, 8’55”, loop (production still).
