Kieran Moore: ‘Gods and Spacemen in the Ancient West’
Private View 08/02/2013 6–9pm
Exhibition dates 09/02/2013 – 30/03/2013
The show’s title refers to a book by W. Raymond Drake, a Ufologist and writer who entertained the notion of the human race being supported in antique times by benevolent aliens [Drake worked in a similar theme to the perhaps better known Erich Von Däniken]. While this is not the overriding theme in Moore’s work, the otherworldliness, the Wheatley-esque suburban occultism and the whiff of the profane conjured by the title are intrinsic aspects of his drawings.
His work is inspired by diverse sources, ranging from folk-horror movies to the spandex-clad gender confusion of glam rock, and the European elegance and decadence of the soft-focus erotic photography of yesteryear’s Sunday supplement book clubs. It embraces the fantastical world of Medieval Christian mythology; the obsessive attention to detail and interest in the costume of the Flemish ‘Primitives’ and painters such as Ingres; the ambiguous ephebes who populate many paintings produced in post-revolutionary France; and the strains of more recent and contemporary hauntology music.
Fantasy art, “perhaps one of the most maligned genres in visual culture,” is another important reference point, its resonance underlined by the emergence of fantastic imagery in contemporary cultural discourse.
The work, Moore says, confounds and confronts traditional gender representations, and is also, in part, a reaction to the multifarious and often contradictory western masculinities which are extant today, from metrosexual neo-dandyism to the uneasy testosterousness of pornography.
Moore works almost exclusively on paper. His drawings “emerge through a process of trial and error,” he explains, “often leaving barely perceptible preparatory furrows and ridges as the figures coalesce on the page”.
“I enjoy the immediacy and risk involved in making work in this fashion,” he says. “The pieces of collage, symbols culled from vintage magazine advertisements, add an air of queasy ritualism.”
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