Doug Aitken, Victoria Miro

Doug Aitken has been causing quite a stir recently in the art world, and we are still having trouble defining the radical artist's practice which can vary hugely in scale, from a selection of intimate photographs to a complex moving sculpture of automated reflective mirrors. Avoiding definition, Aitken's managed to explore every medium, including film, installations and architectural interventions. Just take a look at his enormous Barbican Station Station living exhibition this summer.
Victoria Miro Mayfair gallery exhibition
A major new show of Aitken’s work opens alongside the Barbican show at Victoria Miro, showcasing five site-specific works which will question our understanding of time through the careful positioning of sound, touch, light and reflection in an uncertain realm between abstraction and figurative representation. At the core of the exhibition is Eyes closed, wide awake (Sonic Fountain II) (2014), a free-standing sonic sculpture that incredibly combines water and sound to create a strange immersive experience. Aitken’s amorphous works frequently incorporate layers of post-studio editing, digital manipulation and other processes which are transposed onto the original subject to alter it entirely.
Another unique feature of these works is Aitken’s maze of quasi-narrative films surrounding his installations. At Victoria Miro we can expect works which build on the creative ingenuity of previous projects such as Aitken’s installation Migration (2008) at the Carnegie Museum of Art, when the museum's façade became a screen of projected images, inverting the monolithic building and the fragile transience of moving images.
It feels rare in our media-saturated society to experience something like an encounter with one of Aitken’s works: a totally unpredictable, un-branded collision with a digitally packaged product that offers no clear message or agenda.