Simon Morley

The title of the exhibition, which I curated, is taken from a poem by Emily Dickinson, evoking the limitlessness of the human mind. The full line reads: ‘The brain - is wider than the sky’. In their different ways, the artists in WIDER THAN THE SKY respond to our vertiginous reality. The works they present are mostly electronic – video and installation. Four of the artists live and work in Korea – Gustav Hellberg (Sweden), Klega (UK/Czech Republic), Simon Morley (UK), Rafael (Belgium), and their works draw specifically upon their experiences of Korea. Walker & Walker and Grace Weir are from the Republic of Ireland, and this exhibition is a result for their visit to Korea in 2016.

In art, the Western concept of the sublime is often invoked to describe emotional responses to the experience of infinity, and was originally used in relation to the vast and limitless phenomena of nature that instill awe and wonder but can also provoke terror, thereby suggesting a darker side to the sublime experience. Today, rather than nature, it is often the incredible power of technology that supplies the raw material for a characteristically ‘contemporary sublime’. We are constantly learning of new realities that are too complex to ever fully understand. Astronomers now believe, for example, that the visible universe contains an estimated 100 billion galaxies, and that each galaxy also consists of billions of stars emitting rays in myriad variations of colour.