‘Superveillance’, 2010
Corian, acrylic, steel, lights, electrical circuitry.
156 X 248 X 15cm © the
artist
Mat Collishaw
‘Creation Condemned’
Blain|Southern
21 Dering Street, London W1S 1AL
13 October – 17 December 2010
Preview: Tues 6-8pm, 12 October
Blain|Southern opens its London gallery with ‘Creation
Condemned’, an exhibition of new work by British artist Mat Collishaw. For
this show, Collishaw juxtaposes potent visions of the natural and supernatural
worlds with traditional sculptural forms to explore creation and destruction,
beauty and
torture.
In ‘Performance’, a swarm of butterflies are engulfed in flames
as they take flight. The violence is unrelenting but has a hypnotic beauty,
holding the eye like the embers of a fire. The film is set within an alterpeice:
once a glossy display case for the celestial suffering of the saints, now a
charred and melancholy acknowledgement of the malice it
confines.
Fire is used to different effect in ‘Auto-Immolation’. An
imposing red orchid suspended in a glass sealed cabinet is licked by a creeping
blue flame as it unfolds into life; its petals open to reveal a menacingly
beautiful display of vitality in its deathly surroundings. Crimson sap cascades
down the orchid’s stem and its labellum unfolds coquettishly. Unlike the
butterflies, fire appears to give rather than take life, and yet the outcome is
the same. Nature takes its inexorable path. The flower is corporeal; however
brightly it burns in its lifetime it will go the way of all
matter.
‘For Your Eyes Only’, a three-part video tableaux of a topless
pole-dancer, is set within separate altarpieces. By using three screens
Collishaw alludes to Christ on the Cross flanked by two thieves, the dancer's
pole recalling the stem of the crucifix. The artist draws a parallel between
ancient religious rites and sordid acts of contemporary life to create a
composition of explicit
allure.
In contrast to these intrinsically digital works,
‘Superveillance’ transposes Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s baroque
masterpiece the Ecstasy of Saint Theresa into a lithophane. Illumination is
provided by a scanner that, much the same as a Xerox, roves in an unbroken line
behind the sculpture. The photocopier is the antithesis to the artistic process;
clinical and providing an inferior representation, yet here the artist uses it
to gradually reveal the carving in the same manner as the heavenly shafts of
light found in religious
paintings.
Finally, ‘Lost Prophet’ shows one of the two monumental Buddha
sculptures hewn from the cliffs of Bamiyan, Afghanistan, after it was destroyed
by the Taliban in 2001. The Taliban was so enraged by the depiction of a deity
other than Allah that they annihilated it with dynamite and rockets. The
desecrated Buddha appears only momentarily, requiring the interaction of light
and substance to be
visible.
Collishaw’s work reveals an ongoing preoccupation with representational
techniques, how we consume imagery, and with visual devices that beguile the
human eye. The artist is typically interested in images which are at once
alluring and disturbing, which elicit ambivalent feelings of enchantment and
disenchantment, attraction and repulsion.
For further information and images please contact Mark Inglefield
T: +44 758 419 9500
E: mark@blainsouthern.com
Notes to
editors:
Mat
Collishaw
Mat Collishaw (b. 1966) is a key figure in the important generation of
British artists who emerged from Goldsmith’s College in the late 1980s. He
participated in Freeze (1988) and since his first solo exhibition in 1990 has
exhibited widely internationally. Collishaw’s work is in important museum
collections including Tate, London, and Centre Pompidou, Paris. Recent solo
exhibitions have taken place at Haunch of Venison (Berlin) (2009), 'Deliverance'
Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York (2008), ‘Nebulaphobia’ Unosunove,
Rome (2009), the Freud Museum, London (2009), the British Film Institute (2010)
and Raucci/Santamaria, Naples (2010). Collishaw lives and works in London.
Blain|Southern was established in September 2010 by Harry
Blain and Graham Southern. This is the gallery’s inaugural exhibition.
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