DAS UNHEIMLICHE | 2015
PRIVATE VIEW Thursday 3 September 6.30-8.30pm
EXHIBITION DATES Friday
4 September – Saturday 3 October 2015
GALLERY HOURS Wednesday-Saturday
11am-6pm or by appointment
In 1919 Sigmund Freud published his essay The Uncanny, which
followed Ernst Jentsch’s 1906 text On the Psychology of the Uncanny. Beginning
with a linguistic appraisal of the uses of the words heimlich and unheimlich in
the German language, Freud outlines the roots and meaning of the terms.
Heimlich, we are told, means the familiar, the homely. Its antonym unheimlich
means unease, fear, horror, eerie or the uncanny. But heimlich can also be read
to mean concealed or hidden, which is fundamental to the notion of the uncanny:
to be something that is strange but familiar or hidden but apparent, otherwise
termed as cognitive dissonance.
The selection of artists that we present here is based on
the strong and underlying sense of the uncanny within their work. Combining
painting, drawing, sculpture and video, the exhibition is curated in order to
create an experience for the audience that is simultaneously compelling and
unsettling, where the familiar is employed in order to unlock the peculiar.
Wendy Mayer’s small scale waxwork figures are illustrative
of the proposition, leading on from the novelist E.T.A. Hoffman, that
‘intellectual uncertainty’ (the feeling of the uncanny) is ‘aroused as to
whether something is animate or inanimate, and whether the lifeless bears an
excessive likeness of the living’. But although as adults we might postulate a
fear of the inanimate coming to life, Freud asserts that the feeling of the
uncanny caused by waxworks or automatons actually derives from ‘an infantile
wish, or simply from an infantile belief’ for the inanimate to become living.
Tessa Farmer also asserts an animate / inanimate anomaly.
Insects, animal bones and carcasses are presented in combination with tiny
winged skeletal humanoids that are handmade with incredible delicacy from plant
roots and insect wings. We are presented with an imagined world where
malevolent fairies seek to attack and overcome progressively larger prey.
Instilling fear and curiosity in the audience, Farmer’s complex installations
and animations echo the natural world, revealing the often violent fight for
survival and supremacy that take place beneath our feet.
Freud goes on to discuss the idea of the ‘double’, where the
self might be ‘duplicated, divided and interchanged’. He paraphrases Otto Rank,
who ‘explores the connections that link the double with mirror-images, shadows,
guardian spirits, the doctrine of the soul and the fear of death’. The idea of
the immortal soul, in order to deny the power of death, is suggested as the
‘first double of the body’.
In Gavin Tremlett’s paintings beauty vies with deformity as
his classically rendered, often mask-like visages both obscure as well as
disclose. This rendering of face as mask is often coupled with abstract,
painterly marks that serve to obfuscate the subject, thus interfering with the
totality of an ideal self. There is a denial of the whole but also a doubling
in process here, both physically and symbolically.
Performance group The Cult of RAMM:ΣLL:ZΣΣ (with Yang
Younghee) harness much of the above in their performance and videos. Acting as
a virtual cargo cult, The Cult of RAMM:ΣLL:ZΣΣ translate internet clips of New
York graffiti history into physical ritual, in this case in collaboration with
Korean calligraphy performance artist Yang Younghee and her performance artist
daughter Hyeyoung Ku. Through the ritual The Cult respond to a YouTube
interview with the late iconic one armed abstract graffiti artist Case 2, who
in conversation with mass transit graffiti documentary photographer, Henry
Chalfont (author of the graffiti bible ‘Subway Art’) professes ‘We’re like
ancient fossils Henry- We don’t leave time- time leaves us’. The Cult channel
the late nasal rapper and graffiti philosopher RAMM:ΣLL:ZΣΣ’s Gothic Futurist
ethos of letter liberation into their performance at an abandoned Lido on the
seafront, framed by the chalk cliffs of Margate, an abundant source of ancient
fossils.
Marie von Heyl also refers to the ritualistic and repetitive
in performance, video and other media but to vastly different effect. Her work
derives from the poetic friction and productive misunderstandings that emerge
when different models of reality collide, overlap or don’t quite fit together.
Of particular relevance are objects that serve as mediators between different
belief systems or carriers of sentimental value, such as cult objects,
fetishes, heirlooms and souvenirs. Von Heyl uses drawing, collage, film and
text to point tothe beautiful, trace the uncanny and explore the absurd. 'The
Ease Of Handling' is a video installation that pushes the subject-object
relationship that emerges from the process of taking care of objects. ‘You
cannot know what an object really is until you dust it every day’, wrote
Gertrude Stein in 'The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas', and by doing so
suggested that knowledge can not only be gained through sensual interaction but
has to be maintained or questioned through a daily care taking ritual. 'The
Ease Of Handling' displays an object that is stroked by a pair of gloved hands
- a performance that is evocative of art handling, care taking and pantomime
and in doing so becomes overtly erotic.
Freud goes on to discuss how a living person can be called
uncanny. Animism leads to genius which leads to insanity: ‘The uncanny effect
of epilepsy or madness has the same origin.’ In the Middle Ages manifestations
of insanity were attributed to the influence of demons, and Freud notes our
unease at observing that in others we ‘can dimly perceive in remote corners of
[our] own personality’. The pencil drawings of Eric Manigaud are devastating in
their execution as well as their emotive content. Manigaud has collected 19th
century photographs of asylum and hospital inmates and renders each piece in
pencil on large scale paper. These awe inspiring drawings are alluring,
poignant, unsettling and deeply moving.
Balanced delicately between beauty and the grotesque, Tom
Butler works seamlessly over the faces of subjects in Victorian calling cards,
where they become overtaken by hair; feathered or mottled surfaces; and more
recently bandages or geometric patterns. Occasionally features of the subject
remain unpainted, asserting the presence of the subject from beneath some
parasitic growth that appears to emanate from within. There are clear allusions
to a visualisation of the unconscious where the monstrous becomes apparent.
Freud’s theories were contemporaneous to the use of cabinet cards, as was
public interest in freak shows, and Butler recalls these areas of interest
simultaneously.
Dominic Shepherd’s folkloric paintings illustrate perfectly
Freud’s notion of cognitive dissonance. His paintings represent an
idiosyncratic reappraisal of cultural history, signs and symbols that utilise
familiar reference points in order to create a personal mythology. This clash
operates within a landscape environment where figures and motifs dissolve into
or emanate from the environment. We are urged, therefore, to experience an
inconsistent place that is enveloped by familiarity, mystery, reality and
illusion.
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