Goshka Macuga

Goshka Macuga’s third solo exhibition at Kate MacGarry presents 18 new collages and a series of small woven tapestries.
The collages refer to the history of computer programming which began with British mathematician Ada Lovelace in the first half of 19th Century and continues with the recently proposed programming system instructions by software scientist Stephen Wolfram. The collages, in which background and foreground subjects are alternated and combined like a textile grid, are specifically designed as patterns for breaking visual information. The information – printed material selected from resources such as National Geographic – is woven into the graph paper in a repetitive way.
Lovelace noticed that the instructions and data could represent letters, images and music as well as numbers; an early vision of modern computers. Macuga’s collages observe the history of humanity, the development of technology and a post-human future. Numerous images used in the new collages are representative of the ecological crisis we are facing today.