description:

Can a form ever be truthful and hermetic, or are forms only ever shadows of ideas? In design, honesty is not fundamental, but functional objects are favoured for their simple beauty over superfluous embellishments and other impracticalities. This show brings together work with a very direct relationship with audience, not perhaps through utility, but something of far greater value.
Plato's theory of forms asserts that non-material abstract forms (or ideas), and not the material world of change known to us through sensation, possess the highest and most fundamental kind of reality, and that only these objects of study can provide us with genuine knowledge. In Woody Allen's 'Manhattan, a conversation about Saturn's moons would lead us to believe that this platonic view is not so, when Isaac utters the words "nothing worth knowing can be understood with the mind" and that "the brain is the most over-rated organ". In art theory, formalism is the concept that a works artistic value is entirely determined by its form. Formalism emphasizes compositional elements rather than realism, context and content, arguing everything necessary in a work of art is contained within it, even its meaning. Can objects speak of objective truths, or noumenal others through a married theory of form? A purely cognitive transition that would rock our stable, empirically limited understanding of the world.