Jo Clements: Everyone In This Room Is Connected To Everyone In This Room

Jo Clements' exhibition Everyone In This Room Is Connected To Everyone In This Room showcases a body of new work produced exclusively for The Whitaker.

The exhibition explores visual representations of the human brain through a sprawling 'Brain Garden' constructed from a tangled, visceral, cacophony of velvet brains to explore human connections via a strange sci-fi landscape that infers events and stories rooted in the past, present and a bizarre fictional future. Audiences will be able to interact with the sculptures using Augmented Reality to discover more about the weird, surprising and extraordinary lives of the inhabitants of the brain garden.

Three new film works will be premiered, alongside the sculptural work, to present humorous, unsettling and heart-breaking narratives, melding true and fictional events that reflect psychological theories around the strange unpredictability of human understanding.

The films include Jo's 90 (becoming brainy) inspired by Clements' obsession with science fiction narratives whereby vast swaths of knowledge can be immediately learned from some kind of attached or wearable device. The film records the artist wearing a 1960's hairdryer hood (with an attached copper battle mask) and an array of ridiculous outfits to deliver 90 tongue-in-cheek pieces of advice with a nod to her fantasy of owning an instantaneous learning device that simultaneously lets in and protects the wearer from knowledge.

Stemming from her personal anxieties around the pursuit of knowledge and how we are defined by the knowledge we accrue, this exhibition mischievously appropriates Clements' extensive research into representations of the brain, the psychology of learning, digital and biological neural connectedness and feminist readings into how educating women and the working classes was, and still is, a cultural, social and political issue.