The Thousands

Alexander Seton‘s Flags put up and take on one of the most immediate and most loaded pieces of signification in one of its purest forms. It messes with what it’s made of, to make us think about what flags actually are and how they mean anything. These marble carvings of singlets attached to poles to make them ‘white flags’ and modular illuminated perspex constructions that invoke the symbolic language of heraldry raises all kinds of questions about how pieces of cloth on sticks have become things people have really strong feelings about, and that they feel entitle them to land.

Wilderness of Mirrors is a very different kind of land claim, with Kate Shaw colouring landscapes in intensely-pigmented psychedelic marbling that throw our ideas of being able to achieve any kind of definitive visual comprehension. Vistas based in the real become glittery and alien, almost impossible to trace back to the shapes of terrain we’re familiar with in the colours in which we perceive them.

Both these shows are straight-up asking you to reconsider reality by revealing that the things which seem simple often only look that way because we’ve got centuries of cultural habituation to them on our side. Having seen them may save your life after the totally-going-to-happen Revolution of the Semioticians in 2013.