STRANGENESS AND CHARM

ALICE ANDERSON - HILARY JACK - LIANE LANG


KATE MccGWIRE - DALLAS SEITZ - ANDRO SEMEIKO

 


at Viktor Wynd Fine Art Inc. 

11 Mare Street, London, E8 4RP


PRIVATE VIEW: Thursday 4th February 2010

 Exhibition runs: 5th February – 14th March.

Gallery Open: Wednesday – Sunday; 12-6pm.

Artist talk: Thursday 25th Feb, 7.00pm.

 

In an attempt to avoid what Georges Bataille refers to as the “puerility of the present”, some artists have turned to myth and ritual to find meaning in the now. The artists here do this, not through academic historicism, though that is referenced, but instead they look to a territory that falls somewhere between the Gothic and the Surreal. It is a place, which neither relies on the trepidation of the uncanny, nor luxuriates in images of death. Rather, they make images and objects that charm the viewer through the strangeness that lies within the work. This is achieved not merely through the visual devices of scale and incongruity, but also through the re-constitution of myth and its fascination with ritual.

 

In his essay ‘The Absence of Myth’, Bataille describes a world that seems to have lost its memory of myth as “… the ground that seems so stable beneath my feet, yet gives way without warning.” He continues, “The fact that a universe without myth is the ruin of the universe – reduced to the nothingness of things…”.     How to find depth in this currency of the present without myth, while knowing that empty ritual is mere hysteria, is the dilemma addressed by work in this exhibition. As Bataille states: “If by abolishing the mythic universe we have lost the universe, the action of a revealing loss is itself connected to the death of myth. And today because myth is dead…we see it more easily than if it were alive: it is the need that perfects the transparency… the absence of myth is also a myth…”. 

 

It is this search for a form of reconciliation between the determinism of the rational and the play of ritual produced by the irrational, that these artists undertake. Bataille goes on to contrast the profane and sacred as different points of view of the same thing: the profane he aligns with the detached study of science, while the sacred is experiencing its totality, its continuum. In fact, he then continues that the sacred has built-in its own (and therefore our) annihilation. In this respect, it is perhaps no surprise, if not a little ironic, that two of the sub-atomic particles discovered were named strangeness and charm. At times science too understands the need to find expression through the poetic.

 

While these artists understand that the need for myth is as necessary as myth itself, they also accept that the language lies within the poetic. In that territory of strangeness, the surface of things can regain their depth. However, where Bataille separates myth and the poetic, these artists attempt to reconcile the two. As Magritte observes: “…it the power of enchantment which matters”.

 

Richard Ducker, 2010   


ALICE ANDERSON


Alice Anderson uses her triple cultural background (French, Algerian and British) to create Art based on her fictional childhood memories. Working from sculpture to film, she presents Time as her most significant working material. Memory is shown as the ‘master of fiction’ as she plays with the dislocation of time in the same way that children construct parallel worlds. Her work triggers certain recollections reinventing memories of her childhood. 


Alice Anderson (b 1976) studied with Christian Boltanski at L'Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris, and graduated from Goldsmiths College, London, where she lives and works. In 2010 her work was exhibited at Tate Modern London, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, Nichido Contemporary Art, Tokyo, Riso Art Museum, Sicily, National Taiwan Museum, Taipei, Fondation Agnes b, Paris, Cinémathèque Française, Paris, Busan Biennale, South Korea, and Riflemaker, London 

HILARY JACK


LIANE LANG

 

Liane Lang employs a variety of inanimate objects and fabricated figures to construct images and videos that exist between narrative fiction and still-life composition. Set in spaces that appear contrived, and could be described as in themselves sculptural, the photographs represent a highly controlled, single view point on an installation. They extract from the elaborately inanimate, a moment of animacy, a subtle shift between the observation of a figure as form and as active agent. The figures in the work inhabit their environment like spectral presences, simulating touch and sensation, engaged deeply in mock reflection, standing in for the absent and the absent minded. They provide a vacancy for unselfconscious voyeurism, for watching nobody through the key hole. LIVES AND WORKS IN LONDON.

KATE MccGWIRE


Kate MccGwire’s work exists in a twilight zone where beauty butts up against ugliness, rapture meets disgust and reason superstition. She will take an everyday material or object – a chicken wishbone, pigeon feather or book – and, by re-framing it, generate ‘a field of attraction’ around it. The viewer is left reeling, simultaneously seduced and alienated, relishing the spectacle but at the same time aware of something disquieting, something ‘other’. Her instinctively aesthetic approach – pared-down, spare and sensual – ultimately proves treacherous; the bone invokes the chill of death and stench of the killing fields, the feathers a gag-like response at their parasitic growth, while the inverted flower scarring the book’s pages denies all possibility of human progress through knowledge.

www.katemccgwire.com 

DALLAS SEITZ

ANDRO SEMEIKO

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