A Season In Hell : Nicky Coutts Rachel Reupke Hiraki Sawa John Stezaker |
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23 June to 30 July 2006 The title is inspired by Arthur Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell published in 1873. It stood as an example of poetic visionary sensibility. Hieronymus Bosch saw Hell and reported what he saw. Both influenced the Surrealist movement and are echoed in the works selected for this exhibition. Surrealism is mostly defined as pure psychic automatism. This is not this characteristic that informs the works in this show but the dialectic of different realities juxtaposed through manual and digital manipulation. The artists are also interested in a time and space duality: Rachel Reupke bounces the background and foreground in her videos, propelling the viewer into different dimensions within the same space. Hiraki Sawa merges two worlds, one of pure fantasy, the other completely mundane, one permanently on the move, the other static. Nicky Coutts perversely deletes one reality to expose another while John Stezaker doubles and reverses his images to create new ones. The familiar contexts are shifted or negated. Here Surrealism and Hell infiltrate the chosen realities exposing other worlds, hidden or imaginary. Nicky Coutts elaborately manipulates and reproduces well known paintings by Hieronymus Bosch. Another Land, a series of three triptychs, sees Bosch's famous religious paintings emptied of their human content, transforming what was a stage, a prop or a mere background into the main components of the image, revealing an even more apocalyptic vision. The Garden of Earthly Delights, The Temptation of St Anthony and The Last Judgement have now become photographs of extreme environments, surreal worlds in suspense. Rachel Reupke will show two single-shot landscape videos. The shots appear to have been recorded using a remote automated camera and are presented as brief clips, extracted from perhaps days of footage. Viewing these simple panoramas becomes an increasing complex experience as changes in atmospheric conditions affect the camera, the auto focus shifts and the weather closes in. Hiraki Sawa's video Elsewhere takes us into a surrealist journey where dreams are offered on our doorstep and our homes become path and platform for flights of fantasy. Teapot, cups and spoons grow human legs and start a mysterious wondering around a domestic environment: a humoristic but worrying invasion. John Stezaker's work is best known for his fascination with the contemporary collage and elements of uncanny distortion. For A Season in Hell, the artist will present a series of photocollage that at first glance reminds us of Flemish flower still life paintings, recomposed into a Rorschach pattern but quickly deciphered as menacing insects like spiders and flies. Nicky Coutts first showed Another Land in a solo show at The Graves Art Gallery and Museum, Sheffield, earlier this year. Recent exhibitions include The Art of White, The Lowry, Manchester; The Human Zoo, The Hatton Gallery, Newcastle; The Entangled Eye, Tokyo, Japan; Animality, Dunedin, New Zealand; After Dolly, ICA, London. She is currently a Fine Art Fellow at Middlesex University and works with John Stezaker in CHS at the Royal College of Art.
Reviews:
Nicky Coutts Another Land Saatchi Online (53kB) |
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