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Showing posts with label Giles Walker. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Giles Walker. Show all posts
Tuesday, December 3, 2013
Tuesday, December 3, 2013
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With a name that conjures up images of a pathetic consumer desperately trying to assert their importance to an uncaring corporate God I'm Never Shopping Here Again feels rather timely. The run-up to Christmas turns much of London into a hellish, sweaty, fevered cattle pen - what feels like the whole world descending on the city with the aim of making each other as miserable as possible. Navigating this is like being shoved into a fleshy blender, jostled this way and that, yelled at by knock-off perfume sellers and stalked by invisible, sharklike pickpockets.
So this new exhibition by Black Rat Projects, stuffed into some stygian Victorian industrial hellhole and populated by dead things and shuffling mechanical ghosts feels rather appropriate. This is a showcase of two artists; Giles Walker and Candice Tripp. I've written about Giles Walker a few times here, first encountering him at The Museum of Curiosity and then again at POP MODERN back in August. In both those exhibitions Walker was merely a piece of a larger puzzle, his work impressive, though always a touch out of sync with whatever's around it. Not here. Working in collaboration with the appropriately named Candice Tripp, the two are free to spiral off down a rabbit hole of creepiness, plumbing entertainingly disturbing depths.
There's something intrinsically illicit about crawling underneath the skin of London and poking around its hidden innards. Even the illusion of being somewhere you shouldn't is a powerful one, so heading into the dank, cool brickwork of the arches under Waterloo Station induces a faintly mystical sensation, the parabola of the ceiling throwing out the same vibes as a church crypt.
The gallery space is clean as a whistle, but just beyond there's the whiff of centuries of accumulated dust, geological fag-end strata, beer cans with last decade's design peeling off the front and everywhere the blood poisoning potential of rusted metal and rat shit. My kinda vibe. The psychogeographic sensations are so strong that fighting against it would be like King Canute beating back the ocean. Fortunately, Walker, Tripp and accreted history work super well together, the crafty hand-made quality of the work snugly growing out of the brickwork.
Walking through the thick curtain of the entrance you're confronted by an army of clanking, disembodied jackets. Headless and legless they wriggle and writhe in a janky, juddering stasis. Spooksome ambient sound fills the air - unseen things rustle and quiver under a candle halflight. It's seeing the ghosts of soldiers coming home from war; humanity burned away to leave piles of shuffling brown rags disconsolately rambling towards some unknown destination. After all, the travelling dead are not strangers to these arches; we're stood directly adjacent to the abandoned terminus of the London Necropolis Railway; the very arches we're standing in used for the storage of rotting choleric corpses that awaited their reservations on special 'coffin trains' to Brookwood where they'd be burnt and buried.
So, perhaps unwittingly, Walker and Tripp have reverted these arches to their original purpose; death's waiting room. The metaphor continues as you round the corner into the gallery proper - where you're faced with a view that'd bring a cheeky grin to the face of Hieronymous Bosch. The floor and walls are populated by an army of Lilliputian figures; Walker's signature bird-skulled humanoid figurines meeting some smaller, fairylike dainty homonculi. The two mingle around a giant cage in the corner of the room, tended by person-sized dolls; looking a lot like the android toys that march around J.F. Sebastian's house in Blade Runner.
This is a joint piece, though sprinkled around the space are great examples of each artist's solo works. Walker's birdmen are often confined; placed in jars, behind bars or in bondage. We seem to capture them at emotional breaking points, hammering on the unconscious chest of the figure next to them, clutching their groins in agony or pleading with bare beaks to a God that clearly couldn't give less of a fuck. Tripp's paintings are slightly less effective; though intricate and beautifully designed, they seem to revolve around creepy young doll-girls with mangled faces. The aesthetic is warped Alice in Wonderland, which is to my eyes just a touch played out.
Fortunately the show more than picks up the slack when it comes to the big, dramatic centrepiece sculptures. A tiny army clambers up the white plastic sides of a child mannequin, decapitating her for reasons unknown; a robo-Mum with a lamp for a head and scissors in her hands gently rocks a pram with a British flag on top; hanging burlap bags wriggle obscenely - who can say what's inside? Whatever it is, it's alive and it's in pain.
The best of these are the hanging kinetic mannequin sculptures. Recalling the hell-bondage-chic of Clive Barker's Hellraiser and the iconic Nurse baddies of Konami's Silent Hill they jerkily thrash about in their suspension, arching their backs in agony, contorting themselves with an animatronic grinding of servos and gears. Lit from below they look like emaciated, mutilated angels tossed out of heaven, wings and heads brutally hacked off, manacled in neverending, barbarous oubliette.
.....Merry Christmas everyone!
I'm Never Shopping Here Again was a psychic brillo pad that scrubbed my brain clean of the blizzard of enforced cheeriness that pervades every damn thing out there in December. So brave the bastards of Oxford Street; elbow some old duffer in the guts for that last perfect present; fruitlessly ponder whether Dad prefers the Family Guy or Simpsons soap set; glare at the checked-out checkout operator as you endlessly queue to toss away your pounds on junk, and then, finally - when your volcano of misery frustration reaches critical levels - get your ass down underneath Waterloo and give your brain a freakshow sensory massage. Yum.
I’m Never Shopping Here Again by Black Rat Projects is on at 137-139 Lower Marsh, SE1 7AE until 12 December. Free Entry.
Thursday, August 29, 2013
Thursday, August 29, 2013
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"Fuck the man!" was the yell reverberating around POP MODERN last night. Much of this exhibition is devoted to sticking it to authority, to cocking a snook at the establishment and viciously sneer at the bastards with the gumption to tell us what to do. POP MODERN, now in its 11th year, runs alongside the annual Portobello Film Festival. These are new artists with fresh ideas, a common theme finding new ways to experience the world, to pump us up with antipolitik bravado, to get us in black balaclavas reclaiming the streets from the 'the man' that would seek to control us.
Of course the anarchistic spirit was a bit dampened when 'the man' showed up to rescue us from a bin someone had set on fire. But more on that later.
Monday, November 19, 2012
Monday, November 19, 2012
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When it comes to museums I’m a bit of a luddite. I’d rather wander through a room full of dusty Victorian display cases rather than a multimedia, touch-screen, swipe card extravaganza. A lot of my favourite museums showcase private collections put together a long time ago, the result of someone's life spent collecting whatever interested them. I repeatedly come back to brilliant places like the Wellcome Collection in Euston, or Sir John Soane’s House in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. I love looking at some strange object and trying to figure out what it’s for, or what was going through the mind of the person that made it. So when I heard about ‘The Museum of Curiosity’ I was naturally excited. The description I'd read promised to recreate this experience of wandering through these curiosity cabinets, and to showcase some damn weird things in a nice space.
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| Eyeball Tray |
The first thing you’re confronted with upon entering is a large taxidermied ostrich dating from 1785. It sits in an L-shaped display case, the head poking up into a special compartment as if the case was bodged together when whoever was making it realised it was too small. Ostriches are inherently ridiculous creatures and here even in death it is a figure of fun. Sometimes the silliest animals find a measure of regal dignity when stuffed, their stillness and glassy stare a challenge to whoever’s looking at them. Not here though, the way it’s displayed underlines the grotesque extension of its skinny neck and the relative tininess of its head.
This ostrich is definitely dead. Dead for nearly a quarter of a millennium in fact. But it’s at home here because this exhibition is a mausoleum, a lot of the art here is composed of various bits of dead things mashed up into each other.
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| "The Hunt" (detail), Tessa Farmer |
Perhaps the best examples of this creepily morbid aesthetic are the work of Giles Walker and Tessa Farmer, who each have a number of exhibits on display. Walker shows off a number of pixie-sized bodies with bird skull heads frozen in emotional, dramatic poses. It's comic and disturbing all at once. Farmer creates impossibly detailed and fragile pieces composed of fairy like insects delicately and gracefully posed. I last saw her work at the Bedlam exhibition in the Old Vic Tunnels, and while the scale here is smaller the effect isn't lessened. The tiny posed insect bodies seem impossibly fragile, the mind boggles as to the care and delicacy taken in putting these dioramas together. Even gently exhaling causes them to sway and spin on their micro-filament wires.
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| "Born to Be Wild", Giles Walker |
The death theme continues with various bits of bric a brac placed around the room. A hippopotamus skull sits on a shelf, there’s a carved walrus’ penis bone, petrified cobras frozen in a mirrored duel, a desiccated mummified cat and skeletons of all shapes, sizes and species, including a rather pitiful human one, awkwardly stuffed into an ill fitting wooden cabinet.
The name of the game throughout appears to be recontextualisation. Here creation begins with examining what an existing object or organic remain means, and then figuring out how to distort that meaning for your own ends. Perhaps the purest example of this are the ‘intertwangleized’ paintings of Butch Anthony. He takes antique portraits of people lost to the mists of time and paints his own cartoony designs over the top of them. There’s a part of me that instinctively recoils when I see an historical artefact being irreversibly altered, a revulsion at the bare-faced cheek of an artist who assertively declares that something old is worthless, rudely crosses out the name of the original artist and only has use as a canvas for their own work. But then this feeling of revulsion gives way to wondering whether something simply being ‘old’ automatically makes it more worthwhile. And after all, who’d really give a toss about these paintings if Butch Anthony hadn’t drawn on them?
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| "Intertwangleized Woman", Butch Anthony |
There are a number of other pieces here that subvert the meaning of their raw materials, notably two enormous wall sculptures constructed from hundreds (maybe thousands) of crucifixes and other religious paraphernalia. Taken individually these objects could be small and intensely personal mementoes but en masse they impress upon you how much of this stuff is mass-produced. You imagine assembly lines pumping out tin messiah after tin messiah in a never ending stream, the process making a mockery of individual faith and a ‘personal’ Jesus. Here too is the stench of death. Perhaps it’s the lingering after effects of the lecture on morbid anatomy I went to a fortnight ago, but I see the crucifix as a representation of sadistic torture and death rather than as showing holy and noble suffering.
Even the more original pieces are still constructed out of pre-made furniture, but remain no less impressive. One of my favourite things here was Swoon's 'Dream Reliquary', a towering mountain of old cabinets, encrusted with what looks like calcified bone growing in and out of them. On top is a large classical head, staring straight ahead blankly. You're encouraged to open the drawers, each one is stuffed with dreams submitted to the artist. Some are banal, some are fantastically weird. It's a very nice concept executed perfectly, the act of opening the drawers and interacting with the piece made me feel some kind of sense of psychic exploration.
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| "Madonna and Child (14 yrs), Giles Walker |
15 Bateman Street is a lovely space and it's a pleasure to explore. There’s art stuffed into every nook and cranny and the more you explore, the more you’ll get out of the experience. The only thing I'm struggling with is what all this transformative art signifies as a whole. Much of what I've seen here is all about taking junk from the past and forcing a new meaning onto it. Is this a safe way out for art; a reliance on accreted cultural meaning rather than creating anything new of your own?
Admittedly, the exhibition functions brilliantly as a cabinet of curiosities, a mountain of what the gallerist Mike Snelle describes as “weird shit”. If filling a space with weird shit is the target that Black Rat have set for themselves then they've more than achieved it. Even so, by the time I walked out of the door I began to wonder whether just being creepy, kooky and altogether ooky is a substantial enough message.
But that aside, I had a great time poking about the place, and nearly everything here is interesting as hell. It’s beautifully lit, atmospheric and extremely delicately detailed. If you’re walking down Oxford Street feeling blown out on Marmite sponsored commercial Christmas cheer and need bit of mental retuning you should definitely pop along and take a walk on the weird side.
The Museum of Curiosity is open now until Christmas, with late openings on Thursday nights.
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