One Size Fits All : Jack Brindley & Inma Femenía

The RYDER is pleased to present One Size Fits All, an exhibition of new work by artists Jack Brindley and Inma Femenía. Conceived as a dialogue between the two artists’ practices, the exhibition looks at the ways in which industrial modes of production can be perverted. The two artists draw our attention to how standardised approaches structure and define the world around us.

Jack Brindley’s installation is composed of handrails and resin poles distributed over the gallery space. These vertical floor to ceiling bars force the visitor to negotiate their way through the space. Each pole contains a set of letters embedded in the resin and caught in plumes of black and white pigment. Retrieved from Captcha - the computer automated security test that draws together random collections of words to verify if the user is human - these random selections of letters restricting our navigation through digital space are here presented as a form of concrete poetry.

Engaging with another aspect of the digital and its modes of physicality, Inma Femenía’s ’70 Evidences’ explores the translation of the electronic to the printed image. The work is composed of seventy A4 black printed papers forming a grid on the wall. Through a rigid scientific process of printing the same apparently fixed colour in seventy different printing houses, the artist highlights the elusive quality of the official and seemingly graspable, as the wall reveals 70 ‘shades of black’. If Jack Brindley’s use of Captcha points at the abstraction and uniformity of this language, Inma Femenía’s tones of black highlight the unavoidable subjectivity of digital language when transferred to material forms.

Our limited perception of the digital is further explored by Femenía’s series ‘Graded Metals’. Through image-processing softwares, linear gradients are printed onto metal surfaces to simulate the colour spectrum of the material properties. Following the UV printing process, each panel is further contorted and folded into shapes that seem to claim their status as objects.

The universal language of Ikea’s assembly diagrams is the starting point for Jack Brindley’s ‘Instructions for Living and Building’ drawings. Using blue carbon paper to render Ikea’s schematic directions indecipherable Brindley invites us to think about how our lives are shaped by mass designed artefacts that surround us and questions the place of the individual within standardised modes of production.