Terry Perk and Julian Rowe's 'Catoptromancy'
Date uploaded: September 9, 2013
Terry Perk and Julian Rowe
Catoptromancy
17th September 2013 – February 2014
County Square Shopping Centre | Ashford | Kent
Hurrying through the hustle and bustle of an ordinary shopping centre in Kent, shoppers may chance across artists Terry Perk and Julian Rowe’s large scale mirrored kaleidoscopic structures, alternate portals that reconfigure and reflect the reality of the occupied mall. Using live CCTV feeds from the shopping centre, Catoptromancy* conflates and collapses, fuses and disperses, an infinite symmetry of human movement. In their first collaboration, Perk and Rowe explore the occupation and traversing of mundane ‘non-places’ that could be anywhere.
Catoptromancy is the third project realised by Hoodwink as part of its 3-year site-specific commissioning programme in the everyday places of Kent. Challenging formal presentations of contemporary art in museums and galleries, as well as found spaces, Hoodwink disrupts the fabric of everyday life with site-specific commissions in diverse ‘live’ environments. They collaborate with emerging and established artists on works of chance encounter and intervention that respond to an immediate locale whether a music venue, pub, supermarket, leisure centre or shopping mall.
Hoodwink’s first commission - Jonathan Wright’s Profound Riches - opened in April 2013 in Tunbridge Wells at The Forum, one of the town’s oldest independent music venues. A sound-based sculpture adorning the roof has transformed the building into both transmitter and receiver broadcasting the charged music of live gigs by night, and the sounds of the surrounding woodland and passing traffic by day.
The organisation’s most recent commission launched in June with Ultimate Holding Company at the Putlands Leisure Centre in Paddock Wood. Hop, Skip and Jump is a chandelier sculpted from recycled sports shoes and LED ‘personal best’ displays encased inside a large-scale hop flower, alluding to both the immediate and surrounding locales.
*Catoptromancy.- divination using a mirror. Catoptric - relating to a mirror, a reflector, or reflection.
