Private View: Friday 20 February 2004, 7:00PM - 9:00PM

Exhibition Run: 21 February - Sunday 21 March 2004

Curated by Emily Pethick

The turn of the year is always a good time for discussing predictions, and the period 2003-2004 was no exception. The Economist magazine of 20 December 2003, for example, carried a short report in its science and technology section under the sub-heading, ‘Men lose their fiscal prudence in the prresence of attractive women’. This might sound like old news to an Economist reader, but the article in fact looked at current research into something called ‘future discounting’. That’s the name given by economists and psychologists to the process by which either  an ‘I want it now’ or an ‘I’ll hang on and have a bit more later’ pathway can supposedly be activated in someone’s brain. The combination in this article of somewhat weary sexism, the image of the brain, and the influence of visual material on economic decisions suggested itself as a starting point for Josephine Pryde’s exhibition at Cubitt.

Josephine Pryde has frequently worked with photography, a process of early importance to scientific practices, and has often referenced the history of commercial and art photography in her work. The photographic works in Brains and Chains have been produced in the style of scientific illustrations, mixed with tecniques associated with Futurist photography such as multiple exposure. A link to the the Futurists and their love of dynamism turns up again, quite literally, in a work made out of bicycle chains that is suspended from the ceiling.

Josephine Pryde lives in London. Recent solo shows include Galerie Xavier Hufkens, Brussels and ‘The Bird of the Year is the Common or Garden House Sparrow’, Galerie Meerettich, Berlin.