A critique – via a single allegorical intervention – some of the norms that govern the standard hermeneutic situation of a viewer engaging an artwork and deciding to say or write something formally ʻmeaningfulʼ about it. The exhibition was devised by curator Paul Pieroni in response to an invitation from Wysing to produce a project with the resident artists from the Department of Psychedelic Studies.
On display in the main gallery were four artworks,respectively by Kate Owens, Hilary Koob-Sassen,Damien Roach and Mark Essen. At the far end of the gallery was a film. The film documents an earlier encounter between each of the works on display and Lawrence Upton and Benedict Taylor. In their collaborative performances Upton and Taylor channel a poetical mode of reading artworks that transgresses the basic rules and codes of artistic language and interpretation. In this qualified sense, Peroni considered their actions productively and positively ‘psychedelic’.
