Matthew Johnstone
Metrons & Logons

28 August-6 September 2026

Turning Space is excited to present Metrons & Logons, a new body of works by Matthew Johnstone. The show includes a collaboration with eva duerden, in the form of a series of display systems that respond to four of Johnstone’s works.

Johnstone’s approach to image-making intervenes in a longer history of how technology mediates reality. His current work engages with second-order cybernetics, a reflexive, transdisciplinary framework for understanding how complex systems of relationships organise, transform and observe themselves through continuous feedback.  Applied to Johnstone’s recent photography, this causes further slippage to the so-called subject and object binary. He notes:

“The closest aesthetic I can think of that I could assimilate to my current work would be a cyberpunk aesthetic or a gothic-materialist aesthetic. Objects loom large in my images. Their animicity relegates the viewer/observer to an adjunct bystander or a foreign body in their worlds. I think the technology I am embroiled with, rather than making use of, is not only implicit in the content of my images but performs itself as a medium instead of advertising itself as a productive force. If these thing-objects are dead, if the inanimate surface of the image is dead, then the perfect, digitised reproducibility of this death, speaks in code-spells and to necromancy. This to me feels very much akin to the way in which capital feeds on the living, and, across its many expressions, dramatises itself as the accumulation of dead labour.”

This thinking chimes with cultural theorist Mark Fisher, who in Flatline Constructs: Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction (1999), drawing on Baudrillard’s central anxiety, describes a process of gradual translation of all of nature/culture into information, into code, as cyberneticisation. Developing this, Fisher pushes at the relations between things like bodies, technologies, media, subjectivity, fiction and reality, through which influence and agency circulate in processes of mutual transformation. Even death (!), so imbued with tragedy and finality through the eyes of human biological life, becomes something different when translated into code: mutable, reproducible and untethered from a sense of destiny.

Throughout the exhibition, the systems of display framing Johnstone’s images stir up trouble, adding yet more layers of mediation. Made in collaboration with eva duerden, four works take the image as a point of reference, expanding on the visual languages of display.

Ambivalent towards the perceived neutrality of framing structures and their hierarchical formula with the image, duerden provides armatures that conjure associations through both their appearance and production. Working with industrial materials, forms and finishes, and often reverse-engineering their fabrication processes, her artworks suggest things beyond their apparent category, complicating the question of what something is.

Johnstone’s and duerden’s works talk at cross purposes and occasionally agree. Together, they share a coherence in their strange synthesis.