Brink

New Media Gallery presents Brink, a group exhibition that pivots between control and anarchy. Electronic media and robotic works as well video installations suggest an adagio of fragile equilibriums. There are ambiguous tensions here: between freedom of choice and its repercussions; between what we understand as success, failure, or stasis. Works teeter, circle, and flail in the balance. There is an acute awareness of boundaries and territories. The timing and anticipation of what might happen next; the resolution we hope for (the resolution we fear) leads us to the brink.

The artists in Brink work between disciplines. Miguel Angel Rios and Nelmarie du Preez are represented by lens-based works containing allusions to historic game playing, territorialism, and the search for control. Battles play out on both a grand and human scale, exposing power struggles and symbiotic relationships. Stefan Tiefengraber and David Bowen give us a detached choice or ungovernable aggression; the promise of destruction seems imminent and perhaps even tantalizing: these are strange attractors. In the centre of the exhibition, a work by Jacob Tonski enacts a fragile dance of restraint and perseverance, containing the promise that some inherent and hidden mechanism will hold things up. Yet we foresee each tipping point and the warnings of collapse.