GOTHIC

FRANKO B - ADRIAN Di DUCA - TESSA FARMER - NEIL HAMON - LIANE LANG - DELANEY MARTIN LUKE BRENNAN

KATE MccGWIRE - JONATHAN McLEOD - ROZ MORTIMER - MATTHEW STONE - DOUGLAS WHITE

curated by Richard Ducker

‘No passion so effectively robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.’

-- Edmund Burke 1757

The term Gothic has had a number of interpretations since its architectural inception in the 11th Century: the darker aspects of Romanticism, Symbolism, and Surrealism, the Gothic novel, and classic Gothic horror movies. However, Gothic was originally used as a pejorative term by Giorgio Vasari to describe a culture that was considered rude and barbaric in opposition to the Renaissance that was sweeping Western Europe. During the Enlightenment, Gothic continued to have associations with the barbaric, the unsophisticated, and the irrational, and was posed in opposition to the good taste of rationalist or humanist thought. It is this enquiry into the ‘unenlightened, the superstitious, and the ugly’ that holds much contemporary interest. Thus ‘Gothic’ is a borrowed term in contemporary art, applied liberally to artworks centering on death, deviance, the erotic macabre, psychologically charged sites, disembodied voices and fragmented bodies. In that sense, Gothic is a heterogeneous mix of eras, taste, and styles, not merely a confluence of the sinister with the Romantic. Seen in this context, one can include aspects of Film Noir, the abject, the pornographic, and even elements of camp and kitsch.

Although the themes in contemporary Gothic art are often grounded in late 18th and 19th Century literature, they are also combined unselfconsciously with among other thing, medievalism, Romanticism, science fiction, Victoriana, and punk derived subcultures. It is more atmospheric than defined, and in many ways can be seen as a reaction to the more disciplinarian critical art theories of the last 30 plus years. Unlike the abject, Gothic is cultured and sensual, and wants to transcend the ordinary. It is the product of an excess of imagination, or a surplus of fantasy and desire, giving rise to images of horror, lust, repulsion and disgust. In turn this leads to a preoccupation with paranoia, the barbaric, and the taboo. It takes pleasure in the fragment, inconsistent narratives, the disjoined and the morphological.

For some time, a number of artists have been responding to different aspects of this ‘genre’ to really interesting effect, however the aim of this exhibition is not to simply present the Gothic as a danse macabre but rather, through pushing the stylistic boundaries of what may be considered Gothic, explore what that term might now mean in contemporary practice. Despite their differences of style and approach, these artists do share a common language, they address a certain disquiet in respect of our relationship to the natural world and our place in it, that is different from an autobiographical display of angst. There are intimations of a need beyond the self, and echoes of Otherness. God, gargoyles, ghouls, long shadows and angled shots have all gone, but despite living in a post- Romantic world, some trace of these can be felt in these artists’ work. The old Gothic themes of the uncanny, the fantastic, and the pathological, are now also infused with the contemporary concerns about the body, disease, voyeurism, and power. Yet the irrational remains ever present, even if it is only our own projections and memories. Whether that is enough to constitute a notion of Gothic in our sceptical age is what drives much of the work in this exhibition.

Private View: Friday, 22 February, 6 – 9 pm Exhibition runs from: 23 February - 16 March 2008

FRANKO B

Franko B was born in Milan and has lived in London since 1979. He has been creating work across video, photography, performance, painting, installation, sculpture and mixed media since 1990. He has performed at the Tate Modern, ICA, South London Gallery and Beaconsfield. He has presented work internationally in Zagreb, Moscow, Mexico City, Milan, Amsterdam, Antwerp, Copenhagen, Madrid and Vienna, Tate Liverpool and most recently at the Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels, Belgium and the Crawford municipal gallery in Cork, Ireland.

Franko B lectures widely, including at St. Martins School of Art, DasArt, New York University and the Courtauld Institute of Art. He has been the subject of two monographs, 'Franko B' (Black Dog Publishing 1998) and 'Oh Lover Boy' (2001) and has published a photographic project entitled 'Still Life' (2003). Franko B’s recent projects include a mentoring scheme with artists. www.franko-b-mentoring.co.uk, www. de-mentored.blogspot.com.

He has just published a new monograph called Blinded by Love. Franko B has recently decided to discontinue bleeding in performance, and is pursuing other challenging creative strategies, including painting , sculpture and installation.

ADRIAN DI DUCA

Courtesy Gone Tomorrow Gallery

Adrian Di Duca creates work that grapples with notions of the uncanny within the framework of objects that are mass-produced – whether that be gigantic battery hens, or carefully crafted replicas of cheap throw away toys. The overwhelming scale and physicality often giving these objects a dominating and enigmatically sexualised presence.

In recent work Di Duca has given reign to the inherent theatricality of the work and, often incorporating sound produces work as readily at home in the side-show as the gallery. Humour and pathos sit with abjection and menace.

TESSA FARMER

“Remember the secret world of the child? Remember the fascination and fantasy, the intensity of focus and the ferocity of feeling? This is the place that Tessa Farmer tries to take you back to. She leads you past the polished surfaces of mundane perception into miniature realms that normally might not have been noticed. Her tiny scenarios of scuttling creatures awaken a childlike curiosity.

You peer through the apertures that she opens in the imagination. But don’t expect to discover some lost Eden. Farmer’s microscopic creatures, intricately crafted from filaments of tree root and fragments of dead insects, are macabre hybrids. They indulge in all sorts of perverse antics. Behind the surfaces of natural beauty lies a savage Boschian world.

Farmer creates a reflection in miniature of our society. She shows us its fragility and its ferocity, its poetry and its repulsion, its beauty and its brutality. Damien Hirst did something like this with his dead animals. But if Hirst is Francis Bacon in 3-D then Farmer is probably Albrecht Dürer. The same intense scrutiny seems to underlie the fantasies played out by her tiny desiccated insects. The drama lies in the detail of these miniature works.”

-- Rachel Campbell-Johnston, The Times Newspaper

NEIL HAMON

My current practice uses established forms of re-presentation such as photography, sculpture and film to investigate our relationship with loss and how we are lured into fictions or narratives in an attempt to grasp on to that which is constantly slipping away from us.

At first glance the works may appear as familiar documentation, but upon closer inspection reveal themselves as carefully constructed conceits that question how we are lured into falsehoods because of our often-fatal desire to preserve, restore and remember. I generally focus on mediums of representation that lay claim to a depiction of truth through an indexical link to their subject. These are processes that rely on such a claim in order to function as accurate re-presentations, such as documentary photography and the more obsessive approaches of historical re-enactment and taxidermy.

In earlier works I travelled the British Isles in order to meticulously document historical re- enactors and their re-enactments. The large-scale colour photo-works and smaller nostalgically tinted images that resulted, capture the objects, costumes and activities these war-weekenders assume in a bid to authenticate and re-live a lost past. Each image is printed and toned to match the photographic style of the time, pushing the re-enactors aim one step further by re-presenting them back into the two dimensional world from which they draw their references. The films and photographs are then combined with sculptural elements, such a taxidermised hare that breathes or a cast of a fish’s head, which appears to have attracted a group of fishing flies. It is the point at which the viewer is made to question the nature of the photographs and the relationship between the images and accompanying objects that interests me and how, through such questioning, the hold of a fiction can weaken. In more recent work I have taken on the role of both documentary photographer and subject by presenting a series of suicide self-portraits based on crime scene photography from 1920’s America. Each of the suicide works consist of a group of images that describe a single scene from varying viewpoints imitating the style of early crime-scene photography and re- presenting it in a fractured, non-linear way reminiscent of contemporary cinema. These works are often shown along side more substantial taxidermy dioramas that reference those found within natural history museums but within which something has gone seriously awry. All of these works take up a position somewhere between documentary and fiction.

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.

LUKE BRENNAN & DELANEY MARTIN

Luke Brennan and Delaney Martin make installation-based work in a site-specific manner. Their storylines are inspired by text and symbolism from ancient sources

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

JONATHAN McLEOD

As a child, I called aeroplanes ‘anywheres’.

Sometimes, especially on long-haul flights, you can find yourself above one type of cloud and below another.

The first time I experienced this, I asked my father if we were in Heaven. I was five years old.

My father turned to the man sitting beside him and said “I think I have some explaining to do”.

Three days later he sat my sister and I down and delivered a lecture on quantum physics.

The first sentence of this was “Space is infinite and very, very cold”.

All ideas about Jesus and his father that I had, vanished.

This is one of my father’s biggest regrets.

The man on the aeroplane I later learned, was Robert Oppenheimer.

ROZ MORTIMER

Passages (is this a love letter or a suicide note?)

Created during a Rockefeller Foundation residency in Bellagio, Italy this video takes us on a disembodied journey through the labyrinthine gardens and ruins overlooking Lake Como. The passage of time, light, and people is central to this work where location and landscape become devices to explore enclosure and isolation – both physical and psychological states.

Intersecting paths open out into seemingly impossible locations, mysterious doors set into the rock reveal secret passageways, and as the cicadas call, a sense of languor gives way to obsession and an unraveling of sanity. During the residency Mortimer mapped the grounds through thousands of still photographs, recorded each day’s weather through time lapse photography and further documented the location with video. Her diary forms the narrative base of the work, a confessional and intimate essay referencing Calvino, Mann, Twain and Borges whilst recording a personal response to the isolation and beauty of this place.

Roz Mortimer’s work exists at the intersection of fact and fiction. Her videos often subtly undermine the constructs of society and address issues we would prefer to leave unearthed. Earlier works unpicked notions of Englishness, whereas more recent films have focused on specific global locations from the High Arctic to the Italian Lakes to create layered and thought provoking portraits which blur the boundaries between staged theatre and documentary.

MATTHEW STONE

courtesy Union Gallery

Emerging from a strongly collaborative South London squat-scene of young artists, actors, writers, musicians, moviemakers and designers, Stone produces chiaroscuro laden photography, dramatically portraying friends and night-time players stripped of context-locating clothing, draped in cheap fabric swatches, and locked in self-absorbed states of romanticised visionary ecstasy. His photographic images assert a deadpan observational tone, whilst simultaneously proposing a heightened version of what is already present: taking a step back to revel in the dynamic, the construction of a particular image, and the amplification of the inherent mythologies underpinning his subjects.

Playfully assuming the role of shamanistic lightening conductor for the energies of his collaborators, much of Stone’s multi-disciplinary practice assumes a similarly non-didactic position to his photography in order to reveal how stories are told and history is made. Often focussing on revealing the mechanics of media manipulation and the creation of cultural ‘product’, his artistic engagement with socially and philosophically conflicted situations is mediated through forms of entertainment and performance: helping stage several hugely ambitious evolving, inclusive ‘happenings’ of sometimes none, sometimes 2000+ attendance for instance - events which have since assumed the mantle of London urban legend. Stone’s central concern, ultimately, is with people, place and community. The resulting work reveals the fragmented identities, cross-cultural negotiations and relationships between culture and history we all navigate on a daily basis in the reality of our broadband, interconnected present. There is a sense you could become privy to some important but just-out-of-reach information, of perhaps attaining admittance to an inner sanctum.

The oppositional tension inherent in the construct of Stone’s work, the fractured multiplicity of visual language, location of place and time only serve to heighten the construct. In doing so, the contradictions could provide a truth or at least a further starting point: that every situation, no matter how well you think you understand, is more complex than you often allow - at once seductive and frustrating in equal measure.

Matthew Stone lives and works in London. www.myspace.com/artshaman