POTENTIAL & GROUND

08.02.07 - 10.03.07
London
(3 pages)

RADIATIONS

Julius Werner Berlin,
2006

PETIT MAL

The Temple,
Great Eastern Hotel
London, 2006

CARPE NOCTUM

Trolley Gallery,
London 2005

POTENTIAL AND GROUND - PRESS RELEASE

February - 10 March 2007; Opening hours: 11am - 5pm; Private view: 07.02.07 from 6 - 9pm

Reconstruction and Kristy Stubbs Gallery are proud to present Potential And Ground, Paul Fryer's second solo show in the UK since his critically acclaimed debut Carpe Noctum in 2005. It follows on closely from his last exhibition Radiations, at Julius Werner's Berlin gallery in October of last year.
As well as the reprised Deus Ex Machina, kindly lent by the Murderme Collection, the show comprises a new series of work. This includes a wooden atom bomb that hums quietly to itself, a tiny artificial star which twinkles in silence, and Christ recrucified by Thomas Edison. The exhibition is staged in the Victorian fire station, located off Marylebone high street in central London. The juxtaposition of Fryer's work with the former fire station exemplifies Reconstruction's ethos of seeking out unusual exhibition sites.
Potential And Ground are terms perhaps more familiar in physics and high voltage engineering than in art. In this context Potential refers to energy present in a system, which may or may not move; Ground is the baseline by which all potential is measured. The terms are relative to one another, and their relationship incorporates the very idea of work itself. Their opposition is often measured and exploited by humankind, and it may throw up surprises. An object sitting on the ground might seem like it has no potential; but if the object is revealed to be sitting by a mineshaft its potential is suddenly heightened.
Everybody is familiar with the concept of potential in the human sphere, and with the ground on which we are anchored by gravity. The idea of human potential realized or wasted underlies many themes in literature and art and is the engine of great endeavour. Fryer's works focus on the seemingly unbridgeable gap between the ideal and the actual, between Potential and Ground, and on the terrible cost that some attempt to cross this wilderness have exacted on humankind. In titling the exhibition it is ultimately the idea of Potential that seems to have the distinct glow of energy about it, and it is there that the work seems to settle, high in the atmosphere, imagined and realized from Fryer's unique patch of Ground.