Matt Collishaw. Machine Zone 6+ Automatic translate

"I work with the internal mechanisms of the visual image and how these mechanisms affect our consciousness"
Mat Collishaw

Mat Collishaw is one of the most important artists in the history of modern British art, whose name is inextricably linked with the Young British Artists (YBA) movement. A fellow student of Damien Hirst at Goldsmiths College, Collishaw was one of 16 young artists exhibiting at Hirst’s legendary Freeze exhibition in 1988.

Over 30 years of successful career, Collishaw has become a symbol of conceptual art and a master of visual expressions. Each of his projects is a new bright event in the art scene, gathering thousands of spectators in museums and galleries around the world.

Exploring the nature of the human subconscious and how to influence it through various media, Collishaw creates his unique works - optical illusions, paintings, projections and moving sculptures - that catch the eye of the viewer and make you think about the fundamental issues of psychology, history and science. Behind the brightness and visual appeal of each work lies a deep study of how we perceive the world today through visual images, and how modern technologies change our attitude, manipulating consciousness and programming our actions.

In 2018, the Gary Tatintsyan Gallery presented Matt Collishaw’s Albion project in Moscow. In 2022, the gallery will host the Machine Zone exhibition, whose title is borrowed from one of the works presented in the exhibition.

The machine zone is a well-established term that defines a state characteristic of gamblers who are so absorbed in the game that the outside world literally disappears for them. The term is used to describe the addictive phenomenon caused by variable rewards. The player continues to play because he does not know which card will be drawn next. This psychological discovery was used by software developers to build the mechanics of social networks. They introduced features like "comments" and "likes" to keep people coming back and checking their app feeds endlessly. The "machine zone" thus reflects our growing dependence on an increasingly mechanized world.

The Machine Zone (2019) is an installation of robotic birds, each of which performs a repeating algorithm of actions. The work refers to the experiments of the American psychologist Burres Frederick Skinner in the 1940s, in which he investigated the behavior of small animals due to the reward system. Skinner’s main technique was to give his test subjects a cue to perform actions in return for a reward - seeing a button light up, the animal would press it and receive food. Skinner’s findings that our behavior is a response to circumstances and environmental influences underlie much of the research on the algorithms that govern our social media interactions. Taking advantage of the vulnerability of the human psyche,

The pictorial series The Operant Conditioning Chamber (2022) is based on photographs of Skinner’s early experiments. The birds featured on them, caged to study their behavior, became unwitting agents in the collection of data, which could then be used for manipulative and financially beneficial purposes.

The work The Centrifugal Soul (2016) was created in collaboration with renowned evolutionary psychologist Jeffrey Miller. The Scale Zoetrope is an elegant design dating back to the Victorian era, references to which are sure to appear in Collishaw’s work. In the center of the zootrope there is a platform with fixed figures of flowers and birds. Rotating at a speed of 60 revolutions per minute, the platform is illuminated every second by flashes of stroboscopic light, which creates the illusion of movement: the birds soar above the opening buds and perform mating dances, showing the viewer their bright plumage. Birds are naturally programmed to perform similar courtship rituals to reproduce and preserve the species. Technology companies have developed ways to capitalize on this natural instinct,

The work of Alpha Omega ΑΩ (2016) is a visualization of the human desire to conquer new spaces. In a video projected onto the glass of a helmet abandoned in the jungle, the viewer sees an image of a chimpanzee curiously looking at the world on the other side of the glass. In the same way, people seek to explore the world beyond their natural habitat, and, driven by curiosity, set out to conquer space beyond the earth’s atmosphere and colonize distant territories.

The Nerve Rack (2019) was originally created specifically for the former Ushow Seminary in County Durham as a site-specific installation. A life-size mechanical figure of an eagle was installed in the chapel of St. Cuthbert’s Church opposite one of the treasures of County Durham - a music stand surmounted by a bronze sculpture of an eagle by the architect Augustus Pugin. The majestic images embodied the symbols of the opposing religious beliefs of England in the 16th century. Turned to each other, they personified the opposition of two monumental religions: Catholicism and Protestantism. The metal eagle of Collishaw opens its wings menacingly, clutching its prey in its claws - a mouse fluttering helplessly in an attempt to avoid its fate, symbolizing the danger of extremism and intransigence.

A series of works Expiration Painting (2016) - paintings on canvas, placed in frames made of plexiglass - reproductions of the works of old masters, the plots of which touch on the theme of the transience of human life and its finiteness. Collishaw actualizes this "eternal" theme through the modern presentation of classical images. The reproduction remains unfinished and looks like a sheet of paper with an image left unprinted due to the printer running out of ink, making the viewer think about the brevity of the moment even in the era of high-speed technology.

“I try to find out what exactly happens when we create an image, a simulacrum of the world, and how much it separates us from the real world… And in this I draw on many different areas: from evolutionary biology, which interests me so much, to the history of art and developing technologies.”

Mat Collishaw

Mat Collishaw’s work has been featured in such museums and public collections as: Tate Modern (London, UK), Somerset House (London, UK), Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery (Birmingham, UK), Borghese Gallery (Rome, Italy), Freud Museum (London, UK), National Gallery of Modern Art in Bologna (Bologna, Italy), Museum of Modern Art in Paris (Paris, France), Brooklyn Museum (New York, USA), Museum of Rome (Rome, Italy), National Art Museum of Catalonia (Barcelona, ​​Spain), Arter Foundation (Istanbul, Turkey), British Council Collection (London, UK), Georges Pompidou National Center for Art and Culture (Paris, France), Civica Gallery of Contemporary Art (Turin, Italy), Museum of Modern Art in San Diego (San Diego, USA),Museum of Old and New Art - MONA (Hobart, Tasmania, Australia), Olbricht Collection (Berlin, Germany), State Hermitage Museum (St. Petersburg, Russia).