Spectral Matters

Spectral Matters is an exhibition by Joao Villas and Victoria Ahrens whose work references the ephemeral materiality of sound, video, photography and print. Creating installation pieces, they look to deconstruct the photographic image through material interventions, to challenge what ‘matter’ is. Where the ghost of a tugboat wonders round on an imagined trajectory on the river Thames, the floating vegetation of an industrial park is collaged through video projections. These create vibrant matter, as Jane Bennett termed it, imbued with a spectral quality. The hauntology of sound waves, translucent images on the wall, and video projections inhabit the gallery space and create connections through language, text and images on translucent screens. Victoria’s sculptures and videos look at the human and mineral residues of spaces that have slowly disappeared from sight. The traces of their chemical, and material residue survive as ruins and recordings or ‘stone tapes’- memory matters that reside in the material itself.  They haunt the gallery with poetic images that hover and overlap with otherworldly colours.  Joao’s work uses text, video and image, as well as sound recordings to explore the hidden and more ephemeral interventions of matter on the landscape, as sound waves and airwaves, creating different frequencies across the landscapes of our senses. They look to ephemeral and machine communication, visuality and invisibility.  The work overlaps and crosses over, both artists responding to the other’s practice. The images create matter, as spectral matter gives agency to the materiality of its own making, while haunting the space with its frequency- it vibrates. The exhibition explores memory, technology and the Anthropocene- and how the disappearing materiality of the world is captured through ephemeral means.