The Rest is History

The word "history" comes ultimately from the Ancient Greek word "historía," meaning inquiry, knowledge from inquiry, or judge. The Greek word was later borrowed into Classical Latin as the word "historia," meaning investigation, inquiry, research, account, description, written account of past events, writing of history, historical narrative, recorded knowledge of past events, story or narrative. In Middle English, the meaning of history was "story" in general terms. This restriction to the meaning arose in the mid-fifteenth century.

With the Renaissance, older senses of the word were revived, and it was in the Greek sense that Francis Bacon used the term in the late sixteenth century, when he wrote about Natural History. For him, historia was "the knowledge of objects determined by space and time," the sort of knowledge provided by memory.

It is Francis Bacon's usage of the word which serves as a point of departure for The Rest is History at Dimensions Variable. Each of the artists engages with the knowledge of objects, space and time in their own way.