︎

lunch break is a sculpture and installation project featuring new iterations of works by Christian Feltham and Jack West. This exhibition seeks to interrogate the relationship between physical and virtual worlds, and the artists' position as actors or translators between them. In this feedback loop, it grows hard to ascertain exactly where the “art object” begins or ends - because it is always only between states.

Feltham's work is centred around a case study on virtual currency trade, and its seeming separation from the very real effects and exploitation of individuals involved in game currency mining “Chinese gold farming” or “play-money workshops”. By actualizing work around these invisible processes, Feltham begins a conversation about the undisclosed labour related to the emergence of virtual economies.

West creates sculptures that simultaneously inhabit the physical space of a studio and a parallel virtual world. His digital drawings in software become laser-cut metal edges, exemplifying the removal of labourer from his labour. 'The machine' is an ominous motif that recurs in his work, referring to the efficiency and consistency of mechanization. Contrastingly, the artwork itself is absent of any discernible function - except to signify.

As the synthetic glow of a lightbox sun beats down, a field of mass-manufactured, fake rice plants opens onto a series of redundant, steel cut-outs. Our changing technological environment becomes a site for aesthetic and conceptual exploration – within which Feltham and West emphasize the persisting, universal themes of production, consumption and labour.

Curated by Elaine Tam
With thanks to Thea Smith