Adam Chodzko’s multidisciplinary art practice explores the interactions and possibilities of human behaviour, in the gap between how we are and how we could be. Exhibiting work nationally and internationally since 1991, working across media, from video installation to subtle interventions, and with a practice that is partly sited within the gallery space and partly within the wider public realm, Chodzko’s work explores our collective imagination in order to speculate how, through the visual, we might best connect with others.
Deep Above 2015
Single screen video with sound. 28 mins.
We know climate change is happening; we experience extreme weather conditions and observe the wealth of data, imagery and analysis as evidence, and ‘everyone’ seems to be talking about it. Yet, individually, we seem to have paralysed ourselves from taking immediate action to avoid the consequences of climate change. Deep Above uses a distilled, intense combination of moving image and sound to explore, short-circuit and abstract our slippery self-deceptions regarding climate change. Adopting the languages of a tutorial in meditation, hypnosis and ‘self help’ Chodzko evolves an art work developed from a series of approaches to the subject, including the work of psychoanalyst Sally Weintrobe, sociologist John Urry, theorist Brian Massumi and George Marshall’s book Don’t Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change.
Deep Above, suggests that the poetic, reflexive and critical structures of contemporary art itself might be the only form capable of rewiring and subverting our deeply entrenched behaviour of ‘ignoring the elephant in the room’. The reason we can’t see it is that somehow we have ended up inside it.