VITAL SIGNS

VITAL SIGNS

Vital Signs begins with the visual languages that promise certainty: the map, the label, the diagram, the medical identifier, the legal record, the directional sign. Designed to locate, classify, diagnose or confirm, such forms derive their authority from an appearance of neutrality. Across the unit, however, that authority is unsettled. A fictional transport network becomes a cartography of illness, treatment, grief and recovery; the administrative evidence of a divorce is illuminated and recast as an object of emotional consequence; a sculptural sign adopts the language of orientation while withholding any stable destination. Forms intended simply to transmit information instead begin to absorb memory, vulnerability, and change.

At stake is the distance between a sign and the life it is asked to represent. Bodies become data, experiences become routes, relationships become documents, yet lived experience continually exceeds the structures devised to contain it. Vital Signs therefore moves beyond the clinical meaning of its title towards a wider semiotics of existence: the marks, records and systems through which we attempt to recognise where we are, what has happened to us, and how we might proceed. What appears functional becomes affective; what appears objective is charged by experience. Here, signs do not resolve meaning. They remain as traces - provisional points of orientation, and residues of lives that resist being fully read.

EXHIBITING ARTISTS

Angus Greenhalgh

Jihoon Cho

Lewis Brown

Riddick Douglas Ning

INSTALLATION VIEW