Bringing together artists whose practices engage with intuitive, spiritual, dreamlike, or inherited ways of knowing and creating, at its core, the show celebrates the very human sensation of a gut feeling - or rather, the brain's remarkable ability to "know" or sense something important, recognise patterns, process inherited experiences, and generate meaning beyond conscious analysis and numerical data.

GUT FEELING is comprised of works that emerge from intuitive processes, personal or collective memory, shared histories, material exploration, and instinctive approaches to making. In bringing these works into conversation with each other, the show hopes to highlight the irreplaceable internal guidance and knowledge system of gut feelings on two frontiers.

Firstly, by way of artworks becoming inherently imbued with the personal anecdotes and emotions of their makers through the very act of creating - using the generational transference of shared history, past experiences, observed patterns, and physiological signals to permeate their work with meaning and lived/past experiences impossible to otherwise quantify.

 

 

Secondly, GUT FEELING places the psychology of intuitiveness, autonomy and the lived human experience in direct confrontation with the pervasive, infinitely cyclical façade of Large Language Models (LLM’s). As generative AI technologies are currently being hailed for essentially performing humanism to such ‘realistic’ degrees, the work on show stands in direct contrast to the soulless echo chamber of recycled generative slop that these technologies increasingly serve up as a dismal replacement for the dedicated craft, time, and technical expertise of human artists. The idea that the final product is something that holds the most value is rejected through these works that intentionally champion a slow, rigorous dedication to the process of the craft over its final form.

Similar to a gut feeling, this transfer of emotion and skill between artist to artwork and vice versa is immune to any kinds of analytics, data, and pattern-recognition models. Therefore the show hopes to encourage our ability to listen, tap into, and trust our very own internal knowledge systems to process information instead of immediately turning to a machine for answers to questions we don’t even have yet. Throughout history, the essential human ability to utelise gut feelings, generational intuition and intrinsic ancestral knowledge is not only what keeps our humanity alive, but proven to be the very thing that propels Art as well as our societies forward no matter the varying external attempts to stamp it out.

EVERARD READ AT LEEU ESTATES
Dassenberg Rd, Franschhoek, 7690
+27 21 876 2446 l fgallery@everard.co.za