z is for ziggurat
Keith Wilson
31 October - 7 December 2003
Keith Wilson’s sculptures play with the classification of different species of objects and function, while simultaneously devising putative vocabularies that are seemingly coherent and at the viewer’s disposal to concoct a variety of potential and faintly absurd readings. ‘z is for ziggurat’ comes in the form of a pyramidal tower, that, when looked down upon in plan, is composed of twenty six square units. It also comes in the form of a riddle. The twenty six squares represent an individual letter of the alphabet, which the only ones we are certain of is a and z. Inserted into the open skeletal structure and into the individual squares are an assortment of found objects, reclaimed souvenirs, symbolic artefacts and downright eccentric bits and bobs.The tower is built in an agricultural, livestock market design and finished in all weather galvanised steel. It fills the gallery, with only a small walkway around the edge of it. When combined with the relics the tower acts as a potentially logical structure into which the series of arbitrary elements synthesise into an allusion of archaic, yet seemingly systematic, meanings. Any readings that are yielded, however, are heavily subjective and symbolic. ‘z is for ziggurat’ takes on and parodies a kind of flawed epistemological pomposity, while ultimately giving itself over to a type of language game and paradigm of interpretation. It is also a summation of the work of Wilson over the last ten years combining all the main elements of his practice over that time.
Z is for Ziggurat