24 May - 30 June 2002
Gray has set up a corner of subcultural denominations from which he cleaves strands of illicit and ritualised antisocial behaviour. He has forged the furtive and socially unacceptable worlds of joy riding, dog coursing, and drug dependency, undercutting an apparent permissiveness with desirability, glamour and spiritualism. He has made six fantastically, glittering, life-sized lurchers, enmeshed in a skin of cut glass crystal. The sculpture is derived from a sketch of six dogs encircling an intended quarry, but the narrative is subtly subverted by the removal of their prey and they are left in a static choreography of aggression and courtship.
The dazzling lustre of the dogs is both kitsch and regal, the bejewelled excess of a decadent Baroque era and the tasteless fawning of an ersatz wealth. As a memorial, it conjoins the anomalies of Victorian splendour with athletecism, breeding and corrupt ornamentation. Situated in the middle of the gallery and along with their scale, the dogs take on the symmetry and allegory of Classical sculpture, but in the manner of a dog track rubric.
Gray works alongside a model maker hand crafting the composite polyurethane into the form of the sculpture; then, in a range of strips, webs, and individual settings he systematically coats the body from top to bottom, literally crystallizing its shape.
'Enlightened One' is a much smaller sculpture of a cross legged figure, head bowed and gesturing as he aligns an imaginary hypodermic syringe towards the inner side of his lower arm. The instantly recognisable and darkly anonymous posture of intravenous drug use is offset by the consumerist Nike logo on his trainers and the assimilated Lotus position the figure also assumes. Plated in pure brilliant gold, the sculpture conflates the abstemiousness of Buddhism with a synthetic secular abuse and an aspiration for an imaginary spiritual state. The seemingly trashy and theatrical surfaces of glitz and glitter produce deceptively beautiful but ominously stealthy objects.
