So far, The Islanders is the biggest epic project Scottish artist Charles Avery has devoted to; a gigantic endeavour to describe the topology and the cosmology of an imaginary island – a kind of Abbott Abbott’s Flatlandia but more articulate - by creating text, drwaings and sculptures that not only crystallize a parallel magical world but also try to find a new house for his own ideas.
...(the system) – he says - it is not meant to be strange, it is meant to be another place. What I'm doing is a sort of gymnasium for ideas… I started the project because I was disorganized and I needed a place to put my ideas in, it was not an all-encompassing project then; it was just a place and the place became the island and very rapidly, it became a pure system and the island now represent the world of all concepts...I think that I very much want to retake the territory of art making as a way of thinking and when we think we don't think perfectly we think very randomly. This is my greatest challeng at the moment, how to do it.
We met him in Florence, at EX3 Contemporary Art Centre on the occasion of the opening of his solo show Onomatopoeia Part I. That's our conversation. If you are curious to get to know more about the many sources of inspiration, here it is a lisk of books and films to search for:
- McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971), Robert Altman
- Stranger Than Paradise (1984), Jim Jarmusch
- Fargo (1996), Joel and Ethan Coen
- I know where I’m going (1942), Powell and Pressburger
- Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), Monty Python
- Mistery Train (1989) di Jim Jarmusch
- L'Année dernière à Marienbad (1961) di Alain Resnais
- Stand by Me (1986), Rob Reiner
- The Treasure of The Sierra Madre (1948), John Huston
- The Doors of Perception, Aldous Huxley
- The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemmingway
- Bouvard and Pecuchet, Flaubert
- Flatlandia, Abbott Abbott
- The intelligent woman’s guide to socialism and capitalism, George Bernard Shaw
- Le Cosmicomiche, Italo Calvino
- Franny and Zooey, JD Salinger
- Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Ludwig Wittgenstein
- Meditationes de prima philosophia, Renè Descartes
- Tlon Uqbar Tertius Orbis, in Ficciones by Jorge Louis Borges
