One Horse Landed
2023
First edition, first impression of One Horse Landed by Ben Millar Cole. Medium format, softback with wraparound cover. Offset-litho, published by Nearest Truth Editions in 2023.
One Horse Landed
Does AI present a world of endless possibility, or a dark and unavoidable end-time for art as we know it? In my new book One Horse Landed, collaboration between artist and machine is recontextualised as a vehicle for wonder, wit and surrealism – a tool with which to interrogate the boundaries of artistic expression.
The narrative thread in the work begins with horses, but quickly disentangles itself from the real world. Equine forms devolve, horse and rider metamorphosing into what might be alien lifeforms. A piebald pattern kaleidoscopes outwards. Fragments of parts from industrial machinery seem to rise up from the darkness, exposing broken cables and foam piled up in a surreal underground world. Slowly, this cast of unfamiliar figures becomes one with its new terrain.