Galloire Presents

UNSEEN FLOW

A Solo Exhibition By Carla Chan

Born 1989, Chan lives and works in Berlin and Hong Kong. Minimal in style and form, her recent work focuses on ambiguity in nature. Unseen Flow is a new exhibition from the Chinese artist where she works with a broad range of mediums to explore landscapes both familiar and other-worldly.

Chan uses both the physical and digital to create her striking pieces, often starting with still images of vast mountain ranges captured in darkness. When the eyes, the organic, fail to see, the digital camera captures the hidden framework of the nocturnal landscape.

The artist then balletically pours natural elements such as iron or carbon across the images before dynamically shaking those elements free. The resultant works at once capture the energy of the process of creation and the stillness of the landscape: The grainy memory of the expanse.

In both digital and physical works, throughout the exhibition, she blurs the boundaries between reality and illusion, between figurative and abstraction, as the gallery space is converted into three distinct movements, which sees the artist take the viewer on a journey with her varied use of sound, light, gesture, texture and data.

Unseen Flow is also paired with a poem written for the exhibition by renowned poet and author Dr David Sergeant. Sergeant’s work crosses creative and critical fields, and he has authored three collections of poetry, his work appearing in the Guardian, Poetry Review and Forward Book of the Year amongst many others.

The exhibition features a central experiential installation, where viewers are engaged in a spatial drama: An evocative sensorial unfolding of a more virtual landscape. The multi-layered immersive video work is created by a set of noise-generation algorithms, simulating organic formations and patterns found in nature. These biotic visual crystals naturalise the digital imagery and the virtual landscape which they create.

“The work springs from my long obsession and fascination with
natural transformations, particularly formless shapes and their movement. The transformative power of natural substances such
as water, rock, air and clouds produce infinite varying forms that
seem both ordered and random at the same time..”