The Edge of Reason, 2011, KINOKINO, Sandnes, Norway. Co-curated with Sidsel Christensen.
Christensen and Judd invited artists whose work helps to trace a historical overlapping in the development of the empirical and scientific with the irrational and mystical. The artists in The Edge of Reason presented a duality of experience, by moving in-between a sceptical enquiry and a more internalised visionary engagement to explore the unknown. The Edge of Reason, then, was an attempt to describe the invisible. Via a supposedly rational system of understanding, the viewer was allowed to have an experience with the authority of authenticity; however the nature of this experience wasn’t quantified or defined.
The historical and contemporary artworks included drew on traditions of expressing the immaterial through abstraction, symbolism and other forms of representation. But the works also still existed in an open space that is yet to be fully explored or described, holding the potential of becoming more than illustration, but a space of direct experience and transformation. Perhaps in a state of doubt, the viewer is left hovering between different positions, of scepticism and belief, comprehension and confusion, both immersed in a new experience, and also cautious about its validity.
