Oona Grimes

cutting room

 

14 April to 21 May 2000


Oona Grimes's drawings are like a storyboard for a yet to be produced film - a dark mirror of the authorized version - constructed from the out-takes left on the cutting room floor. A negative epiphany. Gems from trash.

Images seethe and burst the frame, characters tumble through one another's stores in a frenzy; a juxtaposition of conflicting scales, colliding perspectives and unnerving shifts in gravity's pull. Projected demons hold their victims spellbound, hypnotized by the funnel of light as in a slasher movie, while we track behind the screen to witness one more terror after another, waiting for us in a succession of shocks. Violent montage. Gleeful play.

"Theres a richness and power in Grimess work that comes from struggle and confrontation, from labour and risk: the durational meshing of an iridescent imagination and tenacious visual language that is skilled and stem in its syntax, expression and play. The pictures she gives us are crowded with a cast of personalities that we alarmingly know. We can almost name them before they transform in a flux of terror and joy"

Brian Catling -2000

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