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Gimpel Fils: Splitting in Two Downstairs Review: Part II - 11 Mar 2010 to 1 May 2010 Current Exhibition |
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Splitting in Two
11 March � 1 May, 2010 private view: Thursday 11 March, 6-8pm |
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Splitting in Two Corinne Day, Sarah Dobai, John Duncan, Andrea Fisher, Seamus Harahan, Peter Kennard, Christopher Stewart 11 March � 1 May, 2010 private view: Thursday 11 March, 6-8pm Taking its name from a video work by Seamus Harahan, this group exhibition of lens-based artists explores various states of disquiet, anxiety, and tension. How are tensions, be they personal, social or political, represented? This exhibition brings together a group of artists who engage with states of hostility and conflict in order to consider the various strategies available to artists who want to address the darker side of human life. Made over a period of 16 years the works in this exhibition point to a range of ways of dealing with difficult situations, from the elliptical to the direct. The voracity of conflict images in our news-saturated daily lives and their psychological effect are investigated through the use of found imagery, documentary, archival, and staged photography. Anger, tears, and furtive glances are the counterpoint to a whirlwind of friendship and fun that Corinne Day so clearly revelled in throughout the 1990s. The cumulative affect of her frank photographic series Diary, is to create a picture of a world teetering on the brink: like the Blown Down House, Texas 1999, collapse and survival are one and the same. John Duncan�s Bonfires series document the long-standing tradition of bonfire building by Protestant communities in Belfast. As part of the annual 11th July celebrations the bonfire structures are at once positive assertions of identity for those within protestant communities and signs of exclusion to those on the outside. Seamus Harahan�s experimental approach to film-making, collaging fragments of footage with soundtracks taken from popular music creates an aesthetic of uncertainty, often becoming analogous to the themes he is exploring. The unsteady, darting handheld footage of Splitting in Two becomes reflective of the tensions embodied within Stormont, home to the Northern Ireland Assembly, depicted in the film. The tensions of psychological dramas are expressed in Sarah Dobai�s works. Avoiding any direct narrative, Dobai�s images are suspended in time and located in non-specific places so that confusion and anxiety pervades. Until her untimely death in 1997, Andrea Fisher concentrated on the apparent factual status of disaster imagery and the hidden, psychic significance for the viewer. Reframing, zooming, and cropping images of traumatized women, focusing on scars and scratches, her works disclose more intimate truths about violence for those willing to look. Peter Kennard's paintings of traumatized, shrouded faces implicate the viewer with their gaze even when they are barely visible themselves, while Christopher Stewart's photographs of security training grounds suggest the presence of others watching us, pointing to the activity of surveillance and the power relations between the watched and the watcher. Downstairs Review: Part II Carla Busuttil, littlewhitehead, Emily Jo Sargent, Camilla Symons 11 March � 1 May, 2010 private view: Thursday 11 March, 6-8pm Following on from Downstairs Review: Part I (22 January - 6 March 2010), which reviewed the exhibitions held in Gimpel Fils� project space during 2008, the Downstairs Review: Part II reassesses the 2009 programme. In November 2004 Gimpel Fils held the inaugural exhibition of its contemporary project space at 30 Davies Street. Downstairs provides a dedicated exhibition space for emerging artists and hosts one-off projects by established practitioners. Downstairs Review: Part II reflects on the exhibitions held last year and brings together the work by an outstanding group of artists: Carla Busuttil, littlewhitehead, Emily Jo Sargent, and Camilla Symons. Reviewing the Downstairs exhibition programme enables us to reassess the work of these artists and create new links and interpretations. Carla Busuttil�s paintings explore notions of power and authority. Using thick blocks of colour and outlines and masses, she creates images that are suggestive, rather than illustrative of world leaders, politicians and other public figures. In her appropriation and reinterpretation of familiar visual imagery Busuttil�s subjects are at once recognizable and yet unnerving. Her painterly technique challenges not only the authority of the classical portrait but also investigates power structures and how their mechanisms affect the individuals holding roles within them. The duo littlewhitehead utilise strategies of humour, fantasy and desire mixed with fear and anxiety in such a way as to make their sculptures and installations attractive and repellent simultaneously. Exploring the nature of voyeurism their work reminds us that witnessing is not neutral or impassive. Presenting new sculpture and prints, littlewhitehead seeks to play in the grey zone between reality and unreality, combining realism and theatricality, in order to examine the relationship between the realisation of a fiction and the fictionalisation of the real. Using arrangements of cool colours- blues, greys and whites in tonal harmony- in combination with her use of clean lines and controlled painterly technique Emily Jo Sargent seeks to transmit the sense of magic and hope that isolated and wintery beaches can evoke. In these paintings the blank landscape allows the viewer to personally inhabit the work rather than have their experience prescribed by a didactic emotional agenda. It is thanks to their coolness that these paintings, depicting coastal landscapes, are emotionally charged. Camilla Symons� series of delicate silverpoint drawings echo the dramatic combination of innocence and mortality found in the narratives of traditional Scottish ballads, folktales and ancient myths. Building upon the anthology of animal images and symbols found in these tales, Symons� depicts the baby bird that has fallen from its nest, the myxomatosis rabbit, and the crow with the broken wing. Combining the macabre and melancholy with a technique of drawing favoured for its delicacy, she meditates on the tensions between beauty and ugliness. Collectively, these artists explore the existence of apparent oppositions at work in contemporary culture: power and impotence; fiction and reality; beauty and ugliness; bleakness and joy; and in doing so present these pairings as false dichotomies. For further details please contact Lukas Gimpel. Gimpel Fils, 30 Davies Street London W1K 4NB Tel: +44 (0)20 7493 2488 Fax: +44 (0)20 7629 5732 www.gimpelfils.com [email protected] Gallery opening hours: Mon - Fri 10am - 5.30pm, Sat 11am - 4pm |
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