Standard Candles

Abstract

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