Platform - Mike Mac-Leod Worning x Matteo Cantarella
Titled "∞ 3 ∞", Mike Mac-Leod’s exhibition for Platform reveals meditative landscapes somewhere between the corporeal and the ethereal, the tactile and the intangible. Rooted in mystic symbolism, the oneiric and echoes from an ancestral past, the exhibition delves into a subtle examination of language, the subconscious and our collective spirituality in space.
An ongoing concern in Mac-Leod’s practice is the place that our physical and spiritual affinity with the outer world, find in the neuro-normative, effective reality we inhabit. How can we find a sense of agency and commonality beyond our constructed boundaries, where does nature stand versus humanity, what language is available to articulate our non-linear inner dimension, are a few of the interrogatives that inform his work.
In ∞ 3 ∞, the exhibition space is turned into a meditative environment which reinstates the function of the historical halls of Nikolaj Church as a place of prayer and gathering. Upon entering the space, the viewer is invited to step into a circle of energy, catalysed by a series of reliefs which surround the architecture of the room. As if they were ancestral effigies, portals to a third dimension, Mac-Leod’s works feel both familiar and estranging, earthly and astral.
Precise markings, ingrained onto the wooden surface of the reliefs with fire incisions, outline celestial worlds that span planetary orbs, chakras, and swarming geometrical patterns, reflecting the expanse of the universe and the search for alternative temporalities. Through the subtlety of the lines, and intricacy of motives, one becomes aware of Mac Leod’s use of time, introspection and scale, a process of becoming strange to one’s own language. Both figuratively and literally, the process stands as a ritual of liberation: the meandering grain of the wood fibres, the fire, and subsequent smoke are pathways to ancestral energies that Mac-Leod unearths. He refers to these works as psycho-cosmographic, as they epitomise the genesis of a new field of expanded consciousness.
By giving space to the immanent, the exhibition seeks to instil a liminal feeling of being able to be between two states at once, to imagine tales and worlds that, from the microscopically close to the cosmically distant, resemble our own and yet are different in significant other ways. The works here serve as mediums, both figuratively and literally, to reveal connections between disparate realms and dualistic states: the micro and macrocosm, the real and the illusory, and across material and spiritual substance.
Against the collective implications of a world constantly in flux, ∞ 3 ∞ invokes for a primordial time of silence and spiritual presence - a bodily zero-point, from which the viewer can touch upon the innermost of the self to rejoin the boundless expanse of the cosmos.
The exhibition is curated by Matteo Cantarella.
"∞ 3 ∞" can be experienced from October 25th to December 1st. There is a screening on Thursday 24 October at 16-19.
The Platform project space has been realized with support from the Obelske Familiefond.
