Viktor Timofeev @ Karlin Studios

God Objects
Viktor Timofeev

May 27 – June 14, 2020
@
Karlin Studios, Prague, Czech Republic

God Objects features framed paintings on canvas, a wall mural, and a generative, two-channel program displayed across two monitors; these multidisciplinary elements are presented within a choreographed arrangement of furniture and miscellaneous everyday objects. Together, the installation suggests a fictional institutional environment in which something unusual has just occurred; the remnants of a disrupted pedagogical exercise lay in disarray on the floor, implying that the space's former occupants have left as a result of some unexplained conflict.

This body of work began with a series of paintings: three small (Godflower A, B, C, all 2019) and two larger ones (A ≠ B, B ≠ A, both 2019), in which the colors red and blue function as protagonists engaged in different kinds of symbiotic relationships. These colors morph into biological and botanical forms, which interact with one another in a world that is otherwise gray. This tension carries over into a living alphabet, Abecedary Clock (2020), a piece of custom software that scrambles the standard Roman alphabet into an animated cipher and translates a selected text into an encrypted one. Red denotes that parts of a chosen letter have been rotated, and blue denotes that some of its parts have swapped with another letter entirely. The cipher is reset every twelve minutes, providing a small glimpse of legibility. These works are displayed together to inform one another; the paintings and mural decorate a space dedicated to an endless task. Ultimately, the restrictive principles that shape the work are overthrown in a carefully staged manner, suggesting that even entropy takes a great deal of consideration.