Town & Country: Part 1

(16th Nov-12th Dec 2006)
‘I don’t have a lot to say concerning the country: the country doesn’t exist, it’s an illusion.’ Georges Perec

‘…this burgeoning city that goes on indefinitely, like an interminable stutter, a huge slow animal - lazy but quietly out of control.’  Bernard-Henri Levy

Frances Hair Fashions Gallery presents for its inaugural show ‘Town and Country Part 1’. This exhibition of painting and sculpture is intended as a survey, all the invited artists have been asked to interpret the theme in any way they wish. Though already from this binary we can discern a complexity of terms. The above quotes could easily be swapped over so that the city and the town become illusions, that don’t really exist; a sort of urban mirage always at odds with the out of control ‘natural’ landscapes that surround these concrete oasis. With the advent of global warming the excesses of the city and the power of nature have put any normal stable binary notions into question.

What becomes apparent in the work presented here is a series of semi role reversals or exchanges from each imagined camp. Some of the artists such as Agnese Bicocchi, Jake Clark and Ann-Caroline Breig were brought up in, or in close quarters to the countryside and are, one could say, ‘refugees’ who migrated to the cities, and have the increasingly common experience of inhabiting both sides of the coin. Others like Colin Lindley, Olly Beck, Roger Healey-Dilkes, Tony McCorry were brought up on the peripheries, the zones of the interstitial, the branches of the urban that stretch out like phosphorescent hardwearing tentacles into the arcane darkness of the county side, where things go bump in the night. But, one could say that all the artists in this show bring a mix of urban life and country living bound up with the desire for refuge in one or the other, or even one in the other…

Dominic Shepherd lives deep in the woods outside Bournemouth thus setting himself apart from the other included artists and the world at large, like some latter day hermit. In this way the audience becomes a voyeur gazing into a secret, unknown hallucinatory world populated by birds, insects and solitary figures set against fecund trees, undergrowth and lakes. This is a world that the city dweller might long to be part of, a place frequently summoned by the popular romantic poets and artists of the past.

Agnese Bicocchi admits that her work reflects the two conflicting sides of her mind, the city being for her a place dominated by systems and repetitions, the country by a sense of spontaneity and the unplanned. She honours this dichotomy by depicting city scenes using transfer letters and symbols originally made for town planning, advertising and design. On the other hand she approaches her country pictures more freely and with a sense of irregularity.

Tony McCorry deals with the abject side of urban life, areas that are stagnant or in decline. These are places where people would rather not be, but have no choice or trying to get out of. McCorry himself has lived in these areas, thus expressing a personal emotional response as well as drawing attention to these often ignored and avoided sites of economic and social crisis.

Jake Clark is interested in the seaside/suburban forms of architecture, that have a distinctly 1950’s post war feel. Using patterns in the form of Fablon from that era to reflect the interiors of the buildings Clark’s paintings reveal a complex collaged picture plane that evoke nostalgic sun-drenched scenes; but by their very nature of fragmented execution hint at something perhaps more foreboding going on under the surface.

Ann-Caroline Breig plays out urban-countryscapes where the people portrayed act in a baroque drama. She is particularly interested in encouraging the viewer to make a social study of the eclectic and dynamic worlds she creates. Breig is fiercely pro ‘outsider art’ questioning why this work has to be defined as marginal. In this way she brings to this exhibition the country perhaps as an unsophisticated ‘outside’ up against the predomination of the ‘inside’ of the metropolis and its academies.
Mark Shed confronts us with an everyday truth, that of untimely death laid bare rather than quickly whisked away, with his images of the carnage of animal road kill. With his photographic portraits we are forced to witness the simultaneous horror and beauty, the literal impact of animals decaying into the tarmac and the insignia of the open road after a ‘hit and run’ incident. Perhaps what is recorded here is the collision of two freedoms, that of the roaming animal and the hurtling automobile.

Colin Lindley  makes work that could be viewed as a contemporary sculptural tableaux, which references the world of museum display, prototyping and model making. Personal landscapes of miniature buildings and model trees are either preserved or displayed on meticulously constructed acrylic boxes or platforms. Engineering materials and processes are employed to remove the hand of the author. The definitive meaning and value of events recorded is left uncertain.The route of the journey is more curious than instructive.

Roger Healey-Dilkes examines how space becomes place, exploring through the contradiction of the ‘static caravan’ how the permanent can appear temporary and the fragile can seem solid. His drawings of fleeting impressions of clouds and provisional mobile dwellings executed on bits of plaster board, itself a flimsy interim material, can also read as mappings of that pioneering of the ‘caravaneer’.

Olly Beck uses repeated formations of collaged  rectangular  units which can be read as a take on an urban based modernist language that follows the order and systems of the city and its grid formations. But by adding more unstable units and other ‘accidents’ that go against this ideological order Beck questions how there are always other more free-flowing, anarchic under-currents at large in the confines of a system often working through parody, revealed through his resulting palimpsests.     
Featured Artists:Dominic Shepherd, Agnese Bicocchi, Tony McCorry, Jake Clarke, Olly Beck, Mark Shed, Colin Lindley, Ann-Caroline Breig, Roger Healey-Dilkes