AN EXPLORATION of the infinite, the absurd and the virtual opens next week at a Southampton art gallery.

Contemporary artist Tom Dale will be showing his most important work as well as showing his most recently commission art at the John Hansard Gallery from Tuesday, December 9.

His show – Terminal Blue – explores the question of how we activate objects and ideas, and consequently, how we are activated by them ourselves.

Supported by the Henry Moore Foundation, the exhibition runs until February 7.

Terminal Blue will concentrate on works which are important in the development of the Cumbrian artist’s practice.

Terminal Blue – the title work of the exhibition – forms the first part of the show, and consists of a banner flown across the sky by plane in the form of a giant-sized colour swatch that details the shift from dark blue to light blue.

Another work is Infinity Wall, an apparatus that enables the gallery space to continually record, produce and destroy its own memory in real time.

The printed images, which will emerge from one of the gallery walls, only to be shredded minutes later, will accumulate in the space over the duration of the exhibition leaving the detritus of its own memory to mingle with the other works in the show.

Key to the exhibition will be an important new body of work which will occupy the central gallery space.

A series of sculptures will take their cue from an earlier series of digital images, Vision Machines, and apply the digital rationale of these images to actual objects, intersecting and erasing the assumed logic of construction and recognition.

Like the two central commissions, these objects will in their own way seek to make sense of the changing dynamics between interior and exterior space.