Come To Light
Stephen Hughes | Clemens Krauss | Rob Morgan | Clement Page | Simon Patterson
Curated by Clement Page
Come to Light explores Freud's notion of 'Das Unheimlich', The Uncanny through the work of five diverse contemporary artists working across a range of media, from animation, film and sculpture to painting and performance. For Freud the 'Uncanny' invokes in us the sense of ourselves as double, split, at odds with ourselves. It involves feelings of uncertainty, uncertainty of our own identities , or those of others close to us. The uncanny is a crisis of the proper; a blurring of the boundaries between reality, imagination and memory , a radical disturbance of the very idea of personal identity, and the boundary between subject and object. It involves a particular commingling of what is familiar and unfamiliar.
Stephen Hughes will exhibit an enormous painting machine, comprised of old machine parts from outmoded cars, and industrial machinery, which can be viewed in his near by studio, via a live web cam. The installation produces paintings in isolation and transferred to the gallery. Artistic expression and automation, audience and artist converge with uncanny effect.
Clemens Krauss' paintings and performance explore the disturbance of boundaries between the body and identity, politics and the return of the repressed. In his performance piece 'Consultation Hour' Krauss, engages the audience in a process akin to being at the doctors or the psychiatrists, Krauss a qualified doctor and artist, invites the audience/patients to explore their fears, phobia's physical ailments or indeed anything that is troubling them.
Rob Morgan's animated films turn organic life into mechanical action, inanimate objects anthropomorphised by humans, become animated and life-like. We experience emotion even though the protagonists of his mini-dramas which are made from the debris of everyday human rubbish.
Supported bt The Arts Council Of England
Clement Page exhibits a new animated 16mm film, entitled 'Tiny Pain', which explores the radical disturbance of the mind/body in the phenomena of Sleep Paralysis, where the body becomes gradually paralysed while simultaneously the drowsy mind is awakened by terrifying hallucinations in which miscarried repression returns and haunts us literally.
Simon Patterson's recent film, 'Time Piece', interweaves the internal workings of a vintage Time Piece with the breathing of athletes, the two conflating to form an erotic rhythm. A hypnotic state is induced in the audience through these repeated movements.