Order(chaos)
James Paul
17.10.25 — 14.11.25
Opening: 17th October
6-9pm
“I really like staring into the sun,
it's the most extraordinary thing to behold.
In part, I think, because it so virulently defies beholding. It opposes.
The most that my eyes can resolve is the sun-disc, an uncanny sub- and super- chaotic thing which hangs (or maybe hammers itself) static in the infinite blueness of the sky. Its boundaries throb and vacillate about an incomprehensibly luminous centre, brighter than bright (and brighter still for the longer you look). Its massive churning tremulousness feels like secret knowledge; it looks like life, or living, or total obliteration, or something.
Through staring our opposition grows – it burns my eyes, degrades my vision. I will see less and less of it with each look. In the day-to-day I limit myself to mere glimpses.”
ORDER is a collection of animated visual musics about staring at the sun and into the sky. The works generate order, chaos, and colour in the pursuit of exploring the structure of perceiving. In this collection there is brightness, intensity, flickering, and the sense of being overwhelmed. These works were created under the influence of Josef Albers, Jordan Belson, James and Eleanor Gibson, and Jorge Luis Borges.
James is a multi disciplined composer, artist, and academic. They design audiovisual environments, soundtracks, and extreme experiences for the stage, screen, radio, and internet. Their installation and exhibition works are found in galleries and museums around Australia. James is obsessed with amplification, intensity, perception, and fabricating direct encounters with the periphery of experience. Their work abstracts and re-materialises properties and behaviours of the physical world – duality, chaos, topology, semiosis, and so on – into digital environments. They are very interested in unreal things.
James is neck deep in a PhD exploring design and semiotics in autonomous systems.
Recent works were presented by Malthouse Theatre, City of Melbourne, Sydney Opera House, RMIT Gallery, NGV Australia, and Darebin City Council. They design, consult, mentor, and teach into a variety of artmaking practices.