Visual art exhibitions and events with a platform for critical writing
Bearspace, London
24 June – 21 July
Reviewed by: Jorella Andrews
In his controversial book After Virtue, Alasdair MacInytre wrote that a society can only be understood through the “stock of stories which constitute its initial dramatic resources…Mythology in its original sense,” he insisted, “is at the heart of things.” In ‘Minotaur’, three contemporary London-based artists reflect on just such a constituting myth and on the broader themes associated with it: order, chaos and the monstrous, the location of cultural meaning and the nature of intelligibility.
In Christopher Clack’s digitally produced battle scenes, iconic figurines (medieval knights, Power Rangers, Pokemon) congregate below a fragmented Rembrandt-esque crucifixion, but there is no interaction. The images seem to signify the stagnant chaos induced by loss of narrative context and flow. Isolation and suspension of meaning also characterise Esther Jervis’s semi-blurred ‘portrait’ photographs of roughly assembled hybrids. But there’s also a strong sense of potential. Into what stories could these characters be drafted? Finally, in Ximena Garrida Lecca’s sound piece, Matadoor, and in Trapped (a labyrinthine window installation made from used clothes), conventional expectations about the chaotic and the monstrous are pleasingly complicated. In the easily overlooked Trapped, this is achieved, as form and figuration slowly emerge from apparently disordered fields of colour and texture.
Writer detail:
Jorella Andrews is a lecturer in Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths College, University of London.
Venue detail:
Bearspace
152a Deptford High Street, London SE8 9PQ
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