Visual art exhibitions and events with a platform for critical writing
By: matt lippiatt2
In 2008-2009 I will be involved in an exhibition reinvestigating Freud's idea of the uncanny managed by Matt Roberts Arts. I would like to use this blog to host my developing ideas and research.
My practice involves making and installing sculptural objects, photographs, drawings, and audio and video works. I also write on art. Some of my writing follows the conventions of art journalism (artist interviews and articles) and are published in the arts sections of The Times newspaper and Flux magazine. Other texts are written to accompany my artworks and are presented as free pamphlets or readings. I regard my writing and art-making as equally important to my artistic practice.
My central concern is the psychology of creativity.
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# 2 [13 March 2008]
Things that go Bump in the Night was an exhibition curated by Dominic Mason at the Victorian Gothic, at 20-21 Visual Arts Centre in Scunthorpe. The exhibition ran from 15 Sept - 1 Dec 2007, and featured work by Nigel Grimmer, Marcelle Hanselaar, Pam Glew, Craig Fisher, Luci Gorell Barnes, Cat James, Suzanne Langston-Jones, Johnny White, and myself.
By far the most popular topos of the nineteenth-century uncanny was the haunted house. A pervasive leitmotiv of literary fantasy and architectural revival alike, its depiction in fairy tales, horror stories, and Gothic novels gave rise to a unique genre of writing that, by the end of the century, stood for romanticism itself. The house provided an especially favored site for uncanny disturbances: its apparent domesticity, its residue of family history and nostalgia, its role as the last and most intimate shelter of private comfort sharpened by contrast the terror of invasion by alien spirits. Edgar Allan Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher" was paradigmatic: "With the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit. ... The feeling was unrelieved by any of that half-pleasurable, because poetic, sentiment with which the mind usually receives even the sternest natural images of the desolate or terrible."Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny (1992)
# 1 [13 March 2008]
This blog accompanies the touring art exhibition The Unheimlich, curated by Matt Roberts.
I'm Matt Lippiatt, and I'm one of the artists whose work will appear in the exhibition. I plan to use this blog to collect research material including texts, images and videos, and to explore ideas relating to the unheimlich, or uncanny.