EON PROJECT
Bronze sculptures and single channel video
TCL-Kevin Taylor Legacy Grant
GAGPROJECTS
Melbourne Art Fair satellite space
Norla Dome, Mission to Seafarers Melbourne 2022
EON project is a site-responsive installation exploring the perception of time, connecting the primordial with the technological, from evidence of the earliest forms of multi-cellular life to the proliferation of satellite mega-constellations which orbit the earth. The crystalline structures of the satellite sculptures evoke the fracturing of linear time, warping and transitioning as evolving interfaces of relayed information. The placement of the sculptures in the Dome are in relationship with the light movement and refraction anomalies occurring through the oculus at various times of the day.
An Eon spans approximately one billion years, the duration of the formation of the Flinders Ranges SA where the research of EON project took place, where satellite dishes punctuate the outback landscape amplifying the increasing mesh of technology. The transition from formless unicellular life to multicellular life was momentous and is the basis of co-ordinated cellular structures that form the diversity of life today and the hyper-connectivity of the contemporary world.
"Do we measure time or is time being measured? In his investigations into the phenomenology of time consciousness and motion... weather tracing internal water structures, frequencies, information exchange, perception and the origins of the earliest forms of multi-cellular life... interdisciplinary artist James Geurts reveals the gravitational interactions between time and measurement. Shadowing phenomenologist Edmund Husserl’s statement that: every perceived time is perceived as a past which terminates in the present, the present being the boundary- point... Geurts’ interrupts both the present and the perceived past to create a new demarcation and a new visual field of consciousness.''
Extract from forthcoming EON essay by Melissa Bianca Amore
The research, development and exhibition of EON project was generously supported by the TCL-Kevin Taylor Legacy Grant, which included an artist residency in the Flinders Rangers, South Australia. Kevin Taylor was a founding director of TCL Landscape Architects Melbourne and Adelaide.