Positioning objects and images in new or fluid contexts, Marian Tubbs challenges contemporary and polysemous notions around worth and value, as well as the authenticity of images and information. Much of Tubbs’ work explores the breakdown of capitalism and the utopian vision of the internet age.

Assemblage – conceptual, material and digital – plays a key function in Tubbs’ practice. In a complicated good time, digital assemblages manifest in a video essay and digital paintings fused into custom CNC machine cut aluminium. For these works, Tubbs has sourced imagery, text and ideas from references as varied as the Sirius building, dolphin anatomy, abandoned waterparks, economic theory, search engine responses, and (the now all too familiar) CGI visions of spikey proteins and ribbons. The crux of these assemblages is to bring futurist metaphors into composition, just for a moment, before entropy ensues again.

Water runs throughout Tubbs’ works, as a conceptual and exploratory device: from oceanic garbage islands, to the unique characteristics of reef ecosystems, to private islands and Seasteading. The new video ‘where Gs go to paradise’ explores water as a conduit for communication and colonialism through an investigation of Seasteading – a movement led by Silicon Valley libertarians and survivalist preppers that envisages a utopian future of floating ocean ecovillages.

Tubbs’ titles are drawn from everyday language – fragments of conversation and research which, when pulled out of context, create the possibility for alternative and decelerated readings. The exhibition title a complicated good time came from a discussion the artist was having with students and a colleague, in which someone said of her work, “it’s complicated, but it feels good”. This aptly summarises Tubbs’ practice: it is heavily research-driven and investigates complex concepts but, in the face of abject economic-rationalism, she deliberately chooses a compositional poetry of unrelenting chaotic optimism.