(Against) Nature

I selected these four artists’ projects because they raise the perennial question about what is nature? Both in regard to our identities, both gendered and sexualities, as well the nature that we see around us. I feel both the our subjectivities and the physical spaces that we occupy continually raise issues for each generation. Gokhan Tanriover’s conceptual use of the psychological gay test seems to exaggerate the banality of the language of the test with equally sparse black and white arrangements of objects. Unnatural identifiers of an “unnatural” practice. Emil Lombardo uses a large format modernist strategy to make portraits of his queer and trans subjects, giving them an extraordinary significance. In the work of Luyao-Shi there is an exploration of the liminal space where nature meets the urban and the man made. A level of contrivance appears in both worlds made stronger of the surprised nocturnal creatures caught in his flashlight. David Allison’s body of work shows us how Covid has turned the natural everyday in a provincial English town into the mysterious by removing its people highlighting the sinister presence of well a kept nature about to burst through its boundaries, in the form of a virus.