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The archaeologists of the future are going to find some pretty dumb shit. It probably won’t be the things we’re proud of that get dug out of some pit in the year 4000 – our great novels or works of art. It won’t be the haute couture clothing or beautiful jewellery. No, they’re going to find Tamagotchis and stockpiles of Viagra.
You can look at London artist Xavier Poultney’s work as sort of doing the work for those future archaeologists. In a series of intricately detailed and wonderfully precise pencil drawings, he captures fractured microchips, floppy disks and packs of Xanax. They form tableaux with twisted rocky shapes, anatomical diagrams and 3D grids. But there are layers to this (the word meta isn’t in the title just for shits and giggles). Poultney isn’t drawing these objects direct from life, but from 3D models found online.
The show essentially acts as a documentation of how we’re documenting our lives. The drawings come across as part archaeological map, part medical diagram and part blueprint. They’re impressively done. But everything is slightly twisted and oddly inaccurate. The rocks look melted, the shapes look uneven. It’s all off-kilter, as you’d imagine a future view of our time would be.
A screen shows an endlessly rotating 3D model of some mangled shape – making sure you know this is all rooted in a digital world. And that may be the problem here. Poultney’s art screams about our digital legacy when it really doesn’t have to. These are interesting drawings, but they’re just too obvious.
Eddy Frankel