Standard Candles

This group exhibition was devised for this ex-tram depot space, which is a high, top-lit, brick-walled box suited to the big panels, wall paintings and extended display structures that comprised the show. ‘Standard Candles’ was conceived as a conversation about display, painting and periodisation. It featured works that were diverse but had in common an obliqueness of approach to painting - by Gunter Reski, Simon Bedwell, John Chilver and Yonatan Vinitsky. ‘Standard Candle’ [SC] is the term used in astronomy to designate an object, such as a type of star, of supposedly known luminosity that’s used as a benchmark in determining extreme distances by a comparison between absolute and apparent luminosity. Main problems for using SCs are: [1] that of defining a type of object and gathering enough reliable examples of that type to calculate its absolute luminosity; [2] the post-definitional problem of actually recognizing ultra-distant examples of the type in practice. As well as measuring space the SC is a distance indicator also for time, meaning the ultra-distant past from which light has travelled. The works in the show mark their relations to painting as mediated through tactics of display and (counter-)periodisation. The show considered the work done by painting as always also a matter of estimating and stylizing its distance from comparable past and future objects

'On Disappearance & Display'

& presented at the symposium ‘Collector Studies?’, KHIO, Oslo, March 22-23, 2007, with Isabelle Graw, Eberhard Haverkost, Monika Baer, Gunter Resk

Use and Mention

This was an exhibition of artworks by 40 artists. Works included collages, drawings, posters, archival materials in files, paintings on canvas, prints, sculptures, a video projection and a spoken performance. The focus of the project was collage. But instead of simply presenting a variety of objects and images that could be immediately recognised as collage, the exhibition was designed to invite viewers to question the boundaries of the category. So photomontages were shown alongside archive materials, text works, sound works and video, etc., such that a narrow conception of collage as a single specifiable material process was challenged

Use and Mention

This group exhibition examined the continuing resonance of collage for a variety of contemporary artists. The appearance of collage in early twentieth-century art marked an immense alteration in visual experience. In collage, space and time could be sliced and spliced in ways previously unavailable to photography or painting; collage could be additive (placement, juxta-position,com-position) or subtractive (cut, removal). Although mainstream visual technologies have today normalized methods that originated in collage, and although the becoming-orthodox of appropriation and post-production have homogenised the terrain it traverses, collage nonetheless still empowers tactics that play at de-skilling while invoking intimacy, interrupted passivity and subtractive force. A reliance on dramatic juxtaposition was characteristic of classic modernist collage, as in Hannah Höch’s virtuoso works of the 1920s and 30s. Whatever their variety, contemporary applications of collage increasingly tend to forego the method of explosive juxtaposition, often favouring instead an intricate and implosive thinking. Catherine Malabou's writings propose a concept of plasticity that is intimately linked to explosiveness and emphatically separated from elasticity: an elastic form can return to its earlier state after suffering deformations, whereas a plastic form cannot; instead it retains the signs of alteration when stretched, gouged, scarred, re-moulded or cut. Collage in this exhibition is understood as a transferable and mutable apparatus of subtractive plasticity. 'Use & Mention' offers a broad selection of current collage-related activity. Most of the works shown are on paper but also included are texts and video works

The Physcomitrella patens chromosome-scale assembly reveals moss genome structure and evolution

The draft genome of the moss model, Physcomitrella patens, comprised approximately 2000 unordered scaffolds. In order to enable analyses of genome structure and evolution we generated a chromosome-scale genome assembly using genetic linkage as well as (end) sequencing of long DNA fragments. We find that 57% of the genome comprises transposable elements (TEs), some of which may be actively transposing during the life cycle. Unlike in flowering plant genomes, gene- and TE-rich regions show an overall even distribution along the chromosomes. However, the chromosomes are mono-centric with peaks of a class of Copia elements potentially coinciding with centromeres. Gene body methylation is evident in 5.7% of the protein-coding genes, typically coinciding with low GC and low expression. Some giant virus insertions are transcriptionally active and might protect gametes from viral infection via siRNA mediated silencing. Structure-based detection methods show that the genome evolved via two rounds of whole genome duplications (WGDs), apparently common in mosses but not in liverworts and hornworts. Several hundred genes are present in colinear regions conserved since the last common ancestor of plants. These syntenic regions are enriched for functions related to plant-specific cell growth and tissue organization. The P. patens genome lacks the TE-rich pericentromeric and gene-rich distal regions typical for most flowering plant genomes. More non-seed plant genomes are needed to unravel how plant genomes evolve, and to understand whether the P. patens genome structure is typical for mosses or bryophytes