PRESS RELEASE
GEOFFREY FARMER
The Last Two Million Years
6 October – 1 December 2007
45 Preston Street
Exeter EX1 1DF
www.spacex.org.uk
t: 01392 431786
Open Tues - Sat
10am - 5pm
Admission free
Spacex is pleased to announce an exhibition by
Canadian artist Geoffrey Farmer. Farmer is well known
internationally for producing large-scale mixed media
works, comprising drawing, sculpture, photography and
film that are characterised by their meticulous research
and conceptual rigour. He creates structures that
transform and activate the gallery space and its visitors,
incorporating objects, which are often in a state of flux.
Specific literary or cinematic narratives anchor the projects, which are continually
revised, altered and adapted from exhibition to exhibition, even within the same work.
These multiple narratives are used to conceptually generate and contextualise the
processes and materials produced, acquired and presented.
The new body of work takes as its starting point a book found lying on the street titled
The Last Two Million Years. Published by Readers Digest, the encyclopedia presents a
description of the evolution of the earth leading up to the appearance of
‘Homo sapiens’ and the subsequent history of man from this time, as set out in the
books’ introduction:
“Humanity has lived on the earth for more than 2 million years, hardly more that the
blinking of an eye in relation to the earth’s total history, which stretches back and for
the almost inconceivable span of 4700 million years. If the age of the earth from its
origin to the present time is imagined as equivalent to a single day, then humans
appeared less than a minute from midnight at the day’s end. Yet the story of this great
abyss of time before human’s arrival is also part of our heritage.”
Farmer has organised an exhibition structure that incorporates curatorial strategies and
interpretative gestures to represent the publication in the form of a project. He has
meticulously cut out images from the book and displayed them on light weight plinths
creating a new environment in the gallery space. The cut outs are extremely fragile, and
create a delicately layered three dimensional scene, in which, Farmer plays with the
historical events illustrated in the encyclopedia.
Overall this project breaks down, questions and personalises the categorisation of
history as conceptualised in the book found strangely by coincidence. It uses the
specificities of this chance starting point to tackle the larger themes of how we
understand our existence in the world, how this can have relevance to an individual.
Geoffrey Farmer will be exhibiting work in a group show, The World as a Stage at Tate
Modern from October 2007 and forthcoming solo shows at Musee d’art contemporain
de Montreal, Montreal, 2007 and Witte de With, Rotterdam, 2008.
The exhibition has been organised by The Drawing Room, London.
For more information or high resolution images contact Mandy Barber, Exhibitions
& Marketing Co-ordinator, tel: 01392 431786, email: [email protected]