Recent Diagrams and Proposals

For their first solo exhibition The Network Centre presents an installation of previously unseen prints and sculptures. The exhibition title, Recent Diagrams and Proposals, invites a reading of the installation as a precursor to future arrangements of space, time and resources. The subject of the prints and sculptures reflect their production in public, domestic and digital environments.

The prints reproduce a series of pen and ink sketches made using a range of techniques including esquisse, automatic drawing and technical draughting. Thematically they incorporate the Centre’s interest in neurological routine, geomancy and box art. Considered as diagrams they are suggestive of pathways through a problem, both depictions of, and solutions to, an impasse.

The sculptural assemblages reference relational situations invoked in the gathering-points of their respective materials. The central structure is constructed from wood collected in an anarchist-run community park in North Belfast. The accompanying modular works are produced from the detritus of Centre-facilitated participatory art projects.

The structures reflect Guy Debord’s formulation of architecture as the dialectical relation interior-exterior, and the Centre invites a reading of the installation as a whole in terms of an interface between self and institution, solitude and community. Although they mobilise an aesthetics of escapism, the works resist nostalgia. All are future-seeking whilst acknowledging failure, at once deferrals of action and spaces of emergence.