This artwork consists of three panels with the image in the middle. The image, although it appears to be a scientific image from some kind of space telescope is in fact a photograph taken of discarded chewing gum outside the doors of a magistrates court. Through a simple act of digital manipulation it is possible to see the ambiguity of appearances, from the profane materiality spat out of the mouths of miscreants to an image of the universe; stars, comets, celestial events. This is a speculative issue concerning universal equivalence, the imaginary and the real, seriousness and the absurd, and any other binary one can think of, the simultaneous existence of mutually exclusive opposites.

This ‘overheard conversation’ is an amalgamation of a correlation in opinion from two 17th Century thinkers, Baruch Spinoza and Gottfried Leibniz. They are considering the nature of substance and its relation to appearances, extended to a discourse on whether the material world encapsulates the immaterial as one. That is, the material and the immaterial are structured from a universal substance, meaning therefore ideas are as material as stone or paint, and truth as Kierkegaard said is merely subjectivity. The doors of the magistrates court, a bastion of truth and testimony, become the portal to a world of universal convertibility. 

What we are left with is ‘a great game of contradictory movements, alternating, without regularity, movements of exteriorisation and interiorisation; it evokes by turn an exterior reality, then an interior reality, and more often than not the object we see exists somewhere on an uncertain frontier between the two.’ – Georges Limbour.