Known fondly as ‘a child of the 8-bit computer revolution’ because of his software- generated projections, Charles Sandison incorporates words and numbers he algorithmically programmes to engage viewers in visually challenging, linguistically negotiated installations. His multipart projected works are displayed directly into and onto building facades and interiors so that their complex and compulsively moving symbols entwine and interact. Coalescing into formations that create concrete images, his work forms distinct figures or constellations as they overlap, collide on screen and dance site- specifically on the wall. Themes such as evolution, human bodies and the spread of viruses are at the heart of his artistic investigation, ideas which put him generationally and politically in step with artists Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Olafur Eliasson and Roni Horn, who have drawn on Post-Minimalist sculpture and Conceptual art to create subtly critical visual languages.
Sandison draws inspiration from nature and his surroundings, capturing elements of human life as it exists in an increasingly complex and technologically dominant society. His fascination with the these linguistic and algorithmic ‘mirrors’ that communicate notions of risk, hope and potent narrative are the basis of his digital simulations of the systems of nature and civilisation. As a poetic illustration of binary code, his illuminated words ‘reveal the extent to which our language and indeed our whole system of thought rest on primordial binary structures such as light and dark, good and evil, male and female, natural and artificial, open and closed, dead and alive’. In a society which is both breaking down notions of the binary at one end and fomenting extreme divisiveness on the other, Sandison’s eloquent poetic choreography becomes a necessary and thoughtful intervention.
Charles Sandison was born in1969 in Northumberland, England. He graduated with an MA from Glasgow Art School in 1993 and lives and works in Tampere, Finland. In 2010, he was awarded the Ars Fennica award for the installation Language as a mirror of the world. He took part in exhibitions at the Grand Palais and at the Quai Branly Musée Jacques Chirac. He was formerly represented by Lisson Gallery. Sandison’s work can be found in international museum collections including the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma in Helsinki, the Bonn Art Museum, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid, the Musée d’Art Moderne in Luxembourg as well as the Denver Art Museum in Colorado.