Guy Allott, Luke Caulfield, Liz Dawson, Robert McNally
22 June – 30 July 2006
One in the Other is pleased to present a group exhibition of four young artists.
Guy Allott’s paintings explore themes of hunting and pre-historic civilization, and these, in turn, are suffused with questions of art and culture. The origins of art can be traced back to the pre-historic paintings of caves and the carvings of rocks, and into this sphere Allott imports a world of dubious technology, science and a naive romanticism toward space exploration. The paintings, ‘Mountain Stream Spaceship’ and ‘Boarded Up Rock Formation’, encapsulate the twin themes of hunting and exploration, and, in their use of a primitive, or, so-called, pre-civilized society and culture, we find a subject that is used as a metaphor for here and now. The use of hunting is as a culturally signifying sport, and in its redundancy the work touches upon a kind of rhetorical paradox.
Luke Caulfield’s recent work has broken down a unitary, singular approach to painting. Made up of black and white paintings, painted, he says, ‘by the documenter’, and hung on the wall, they rework and reanimate incipient subject matter from counterpart works. The series also includes boxed colour paintings painted by an alter ego called Hurm Must who paints and crates the paintings - possibly to hide or protect them after their documentation. He describes Hurm Must as ‘an anxious man, his paintings based on duplication, doppelgangers and split personalities’. The documenter appropriates his work, photographing and then painting the photograph in order to get closer to the materiality of the original painting.
Liz Dawson’s landscapes start their existence as actual places, but located within the studio. Craft model kits, cut outs, clay and debris combine to create miniature worlds, where Dawson can manipulate and manufacture each element. The pertinence of the paintings lies in their compositional value - fabricated from the mundane and the fantastical. Rendered in intense hues, they produce a detailed articulation of artificially constructed domains, both manifest and imaginary. The places Dawson paints are engineered and necessary; skewed and falsely exotic.
Robert McNally’s high definition drawings are a combination of miniature scale, cartoon iconography and architectural technicality. They take their lead from a notion of make-believe, depicting a series of tangential juxtapositions, characters, creatures and exterior/interior spaces, built around a densely precise articulation of minutiae. The drawings play with notions of the absurd, the gothic, and the surreal, as seen through a world of artifice, assimilation and make-believe.
So How Was It? 2006
Pencil on paper,
71 x 49cm