Bangkok--13 Jan--
“Desaturated” Contemporary Interdisciplinary British ArtSeamus Harahan, Ginny Reed, Elizabeth McAlpine, Moira Lovell, Allsopp and Weir and Simon Faithfull
“Desaturated” is a group show of seven contemporary British artists focused around ideas of subtraction, vacancy and false referents in society. These themes are teased out through video works, installations and photographs dealing with the use of colour and memory. Works hit on a variety of poignant themes specific to the UK, but with global resonance at this point in history, such as the use of colour in relations to simmering political tension in Northern Ireland, sexuality in contemporary fetishized British schoolgirl culture and using black voids to break up the floor space of the gallery.
Curators Laura Cooper and Connelly La Mar have focused their selection of works around emerging artists, alongside established names on the contemporary art scene. An opening reception to celebrate the event will be held at The Art Centre starting at 7 p.m. on February 4, 2009.
Works in this show principally deal with demarkation in society, which plays a major part in defining the way people navigate the cityscape, and moreover media and visual culture. Selected work play with and often churlishly prod at prevailing social mores, or a yearning for naivety. Refreshingly works do not aspire to transcend these established points or transcend them, rather en masse they represent a paradigm shift in aesthetic terms dealing with the idea of what saturation is, and what it can do, whether in Bangkok and Kanchanaburi or London and Blackpool.
Artists, such as video maker Simon Faithfull are striving to reclaim some territory and subvert some ideas of containment using installations. Faithfull never rely on being garish or blunt for the sake of it, rather a fledgling since of discovery is inherent in his use of balloons and cameras - to float video pieces through the air as almost virtual escape pods from the country. Islands birth an idea of isolation, and escape vehicles are a crucial notion in relation to any idea of confinement artistic or physical. Similar to black holes in Ginny Reed’s installation, included in the show.
Aesthetics must be voided and reconstructed in a seminal fashion in order to break through in modern society. Voids and reductions beg questions in “Desaturated” about defining where our visual saturation with images rests and if leaving it behind yields more than a path to personal introspection; being that inundation is as complex as people themselves are - it is a fascinating question. So, these works hopefully can at times serve as an index guiding viewers away from a trained way of looking at seemingly mundane and banal subject matter at times.
Nostalgia is a troubling part of anything receding, whether it be memory, pain, lust or longing. Process sets this into motion in the video work of Elizabeth McAlpine whose work has in turn in the past wrestled with explosions reduced to snippets of sound, while making noise itself a decontextualized element of her work.
Taking things out is a major part of claiming anything substantial in modern life, as bustling lifestyles make people seek more desperately things of themselves. This relates to the idea of a loss of saturation in object, emotion and meaning. Yet, these artist raise desaturation itself as a self-driven paradigm that gives new meaning to works. Finally, reduction is not principally about minimalism, and colour does not always point to robust, poppy or infectious meaning. Artists’ aesthetic realisation of this is in a way a reflection of societal struggles, and a longing for a sense of at times uncomfortable identity.
siriwatyo
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