Nicholas Crombach - Point of Collision (Opening Event)

Through these pieces, Crombach explores themes of archaeology, museology, and materiality. The exhibition considers how museum artefacts narrate the passage of time and how, through forensic observation, we can gain insights into past rituals, social structures, and technologies. Crombach's sculptures incorporate found objects, fragments of automobiles encased in melted material, and carved forms. These works evoke a sense of temporal displacement, existing between the past and hinting at future remnants.

The three Erratic Boulders have been positioned across the floor with luminated headlights fused into the high-density foam boulders. The front and back headlights are stacked on top of each other as if being warped in time. The glaring headlights projecting into the space, evokes an unsettling sense of multiple impacts and the acceleration of both bodies and technology. These excavated materials tell us about our relation to nature and how innovations both enhance our lived experience and destruct our surrounding we depend on.

Walking through museums the presentation of the artifacts significantly shapes our understanding of their historical context and importance. The carefully staged environments, of marbles, geological rocks and fossils, evoke a sense of drama and curiosity. Mounted on the walls at the gallery the Xenoliths’ flat surfaces reveals embedded objects and hints at natural eruption, a melting point in time with one geological fragment trapped within another. The encapsulation and preservation of various found objects – brass, copper, bricks, stones, and corals – within cast aluminium, are almost like modern-day fossils. The shapes, textures, and colors are beautifully exposed on the surface. Everyday items like candle holders, brass bowls, and vessels, while fixed within the flat surface, hint at their three-dimensional forms extending beyond what is immediately visible.

Crombach prompts the viewer to question the inherent value of materials and their formation. Where a boulder is carved from foam, it challenges our perception of weight. The geological forms cast by the artist explore the relationship between the artificial and the natural. Rather than giving a sense of false truth they bring a closer connection to the material and the relation between the man-made and the natural. Through carving, casting, and the deliberate placement of objects, Crombach constructs time-based narratives that encompass events, materials, and the “artist's” labour. What might appear to be incidental are in fact carefully planned executions and thought through sculptural processes, generating a tension between the sense of an archaeological discovery and the uncertain interplay between humans and nature, consistence and change. Erratic Boulders and Xenolith are moments of chaos, eruptions, and collisions, captured and moulded into stillness.

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