MATT FRANKS

“The intensification of common dumb cartoon imagery is at the heart of Matt Frank’s sculptures. Taking conventional reduced two dimensional renderings of images such as skulls, nuclear bomb explosions, swirls and vortexes, Franks solidifies these graphic simplifications into three dimensional forms in ludicrously bright acidic or pastel colours. Composited into intricate near baroque, comical and outlandish objects, Franks’ sculptures don’t seems to be depictions of either straightforwardly inanimate things nor of creatures in their own right. Rather they seem to be bodies that lie somewhere between the two, hybrids with their own mysterious exuberance.”  Copyright Suhail Malik 2004

courtesy Houldsworth Gallery



SHEENA MACRAE:

Sheena Macrae’s work manipulates popular iconography in film and video through compression, exploring the modern fascination with speed, nostalgia, information and entertainment. She misappropriates the readymade formats of cinema and television through digital media technologies fixating obsessively on pivotal recurring narrative junctions. These works parody and reconstruct the dynamics of Hollywood clichés, collective memory and the standardisation of film narratives, co-opting the syntax of film language to develop alternative meanings through a post- production remix. 

Stereo Alphaville takes the entire script of Goddard’s sci-fi black and white cult film, a film that hinges on the erasure of emotional language as ways to control the inhabitants of the futuristic Alphaville. The body of the script’s text weighs heavily on the last three words “I love you.” Drink has been called the “missing episode” from the TV series Dallas. Macrae’s re-working starts in the morning and follows through a full day where the characters ply themselves with alcohol through the difficult pauses until inebriation of evening. 

“Sheena Macrae’s videos might best be described as ‘compressions’: her massive feats of editing remix films into miniature, yet unabridged sagas: Pulp Fiction reduced to exactly one minute, Gone With the Wind crunched from 3.5 hours down to commercial break size. Their effect is something like speed- reading: images fly by in rapid sequence, focussing on only the key elements of action... Like a drug or a diamond, a screen-size cosmos for the taking. Ergonomic, perfect, and larger than life.” -- Patricia Ellis, excerpt from Flatpack TV, 2005

RICHARD DUCKER:

“The use of cement in Richard Ducker’s most recent sculptures emphasises a kind of death, or a modernist monumentality, but the objects it coats and with which it is juxtaposed evoke nostalgia, myths soaked in dreams, and fairy tales gone wrong. If a domestic interior is evoked, it is one in which homely things have sprouted aggressive appendages, grown unexpected textures, or multiplied into viral aggregates, as if to embody the nightmares that commodity fetishes might dream of if they fell asleep. Like Proust’s madeleine dipped in tea, they evoke memories and sensations according to a logic that combines cultural association with phenomenological fantasies of sensual experiences, often clashing within the same piece…Emotionally evocative without ever telling a clear story, affecting without being obvious, Ducker’s sculptures seem to be there with the mute theatricality of minimalism, yet to engage with notions of transformation. With simple formal means, they excavate fears, anxieties and desires associated with the most visceral of physical sensations – attraction and repulsion, pleasure and pain, need and self-sufficiency. The work keeps referring back to the body, a missing body we as viewers cannot help but imagine filling-in for with our own, transforming it into the ill-fitting piece of a jigsaw we are trying in vain to complete with our presence.” -- (excerpt) Patrizia Di Bello, 2007