Brianna Leatherbury’s set up “Survival Bias” begins with a query: “which object would you’re taking to your grave?” The artist poses this query to anybody who has ever invested within the inventory market. This dialog is adopted by an alternate: Leatherbury asks permission to borrow their chosen object and produce a replica—earlier than returning it unscathed. Earlier grave items have included a harp, suitcase, digital scale and a wardrobe.

At Brunette Coleman, this borrowed object is the urn of a beloved cat’s ashes, Fudge, offered by a London-based shareholder. By way of the alchemical technique of copper plating, Leatherbury renders the urn right into a friable relic—resembling an early fossil, or prehistoric possession buried alongside historic the Aristocracy. The artist views these objects as untimely artefacts of the inventory market and its traders, envisioning a future the place our capitalist society exists solely as a bygone legacy.

Immediately the worth of preservation is printed by a multi-billion greenback business: the “chilly chain”—a globally interconnected system of freezing, transporting and storing temperature-sensitive items, in an effort to lengthen their usability. At Brunette Coleman, a chilly room dominates. The insulated dice is artificially cooled by means of a system of metals and gasses, syphoning warmth out of 1 place and forcing it into one other. These two environments of the gallery turn out to be contingent on one another—one half cooling whereas the opposite heats—demonstrating the intense “thermal regimes” that underpin our trendy reliance on these cooling techniques.

This science of cooling—generally known as cryogenics—has introduced us a cellular and eternal winter. Halting decay and degradation, this subzero intervention transforms life into controllable potential. As a cloth, copper offers a excessive conductivity that makes it an ideal factor for this manipulation of temperature. In Fudge, the a number of copper sculptures substitute the warmth exchangers of the chilly room. Introduced into this cycle, the unique grave object is resourced as a mechanical part for the cooling system.

“Survival Bias” is a sort of logical error wherein we selectively assess solely profitable outcomes, the survivors of time, largely as a result of there’s much less proof of their different. These distinctive successes, preserved bodily turn out to be, by default, legacy. Leatherbury notes that, “in decoupling mortality from time for productiveness’s sake, extending ‘life’ into short-term inanimacy, means we’re right this moment all the time coping with cryopolitics—the observe of asking “who’s permitted to die?”

at Brunette Coleman, London
till July 6, 2024