Urban Gothic

This exhibition curated by George Bolster brings together several international artists whose work implies a morbid fascination; macabre elements run through each of their varied practices. Epic is a device used here as something to explore ideas of heightened or altered emotional states. The dark side of the subconscious is explored through a fusing together of psyche and taboo. These works simultaneously swing from implied crassness to material seduction. A fantastical or gothic sense of their chosen subject threads the artists together.

George Bolster's (IRL) intricate pencil drawings on veneered wooden panels depict figures of saints high on heavenly music. Bullet with Butterfly Wings (2007) shows a tattooed rock god in the form of Christ, each of his tattoos are allegorical symbols for Christ, he is set high on the cross, blood in the form of ribbons flooding down on to the floor. At his feet a Japanese inspired Madonna and a sculpture of Adam´s scull with speakers for eyes with jewels spelling his name set into its teeth.

In Kate-Rose Carrick´s (UK) cinematic architectural perversions the audience wanders into a world of disturbed displacement. Exploiting the unsettling slippage between a normative world and this constructed unknown one. A staircase appears to lead to nowhere, encouraging the viewer to climb, in search of enlightenment, only to find a shadow, which is not their own, appears to follow.

In his paintings, Mark Dean Veca (USA) portrays images that are a fusion of hero/villain comics inhabiting danger-ridden landscapes set against a backdrop resembling moldering wallpaper in unkempt houses. His huge expanded wall paintings, which carry with them a strong reference to street graffiti sometimes take the form of putrid organs exploding and dissolving our idea of the space in which they are made. In Oedipus Wrecked (2002) a floor based painting the universe appears to extend down beyond the surface of a domestic carpet to new and unknown worlds.

Kelly Eginton (USA) hopes to discover something otherworldly by building up from the crudest and most basic elements until a presence is nearly or just barely perceptible. She considers true creative endeavour to be a humble and dangerous pursuit. One must be ever mindful of the perils of inviting the devil into ones house. Her stage like mine shaft sculpture conceals a hidden narrative of what lies beneath, or inside, her obsession with mountains.

In her sound work, Common Prayer (2001), Jane Philbrick (USA) uses the voices of 12 individually recorded clergymen speaking the first 30-seconds of Rudolph Giuliani´s Senate campaign withdrawal speech of July 2000, for which he cites health concerns arising from his recently diagnosed prostate cancer. Through this re-voicing she continues her project of "meaning making" through the manipulation and representation of sound and image. Her Stigmata Gloves (2006) in white and black leather with silk lining similarly engage with idea of private pain in the public domain.

Rachael Reupke (UK) uses a wide range of references, which serve her body of work exploring ideas about cinema, spectacle and the modern world. In single-shot video works, she deconstructs, undermine and reorder conventional cinematic hierarchies. In Untitled (2006) we are confronted with what turns out to be a surveillance camera which strains near and far in terms of focus to capture anything which might move. But the landscape contains no trace of humans leading us to believe that this is a post-human world where the machines still record what no one will see.

Ewoud Van Rijn (NL) illustrates lurid scenes of life sex and death in fairyland. The vast sheet of white paper is for him a theatrical space. As such it is the re-creation of a mental space; everything that takes place within is an enactment of mental processes and the impulses that trigger them. A few schematic props set the stage. Van Rijn´s protagonists, wide eyed, svelte nymphets, lounge around seductively. We are beguiled ­ until we realize that they are munching nonchalantly on a cannibal kill, or mutilating themselves, or drinking each other´s blood.

Curators Talk: Saturday 2 pm October 20th 2007v

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