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click here to return to main page for: Lurking...There, there
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Monsters don’t just lurk under the bed… they dwell on our cultural dark side. Throughout the ages they have transformed their various guises according to the shifts in society's values and morals. Often ugly, ALWAYS frightening … monsters are manifestations of our polar opposites, our cultural anti-ideals. Ridiculous and contradictory to our firm grasp on reality, they nonetheless hover in the backblocks of our mind.
So what’s lurking there today? 10 artists crawl into the spooky bleakness to hunt the beasts that lurk in all our dark corners. What do we see when we swing the lantern their way?
Don’t be frightened, close your eyes, what do you see?
Emily Ferretti fearlessly taking on the role of monster – in this case herself. An endless parade of smeared, scumbled, washed out, obliterated, scratchy, dropped out images, painted rapidly at one sitting. Each image is a record of her inner world, snap-frozen at the moment of realization. Unusual for one so young to understand that we are the instigators of our own demise. We are all the monsters. Ugly and sexy.
Just under the bed we find… Lindsay Moffat celebrating the still taboo subject of prostitution. A working girl is juxtaposed with a bee collecting pollen to take to the hive. The title of the installation, ‘Mary, Be Like the Bee’ exhorts the protagonist to be industrious in her work, as she flits from one nectar pot to another. We should also remember that the busy bee carries a sting in her tail. Flowers are the sexual organs of plants. It’s the birds and the bees. It’s only natural, honey.
And over there, crouching in the shadows… Steve Cox unleashing the potential horrors lying dormant in childhood imagery. Even the once cute become bearers of sinister agenda (floating skin) - a rabbit stricken with drug psychosis, a half blind Rastafarian puppy. In ‘O Daddy’ he deals with the possibilities of fascism in all father/child relationships. His sketches reveal a polymorphously perverse world where sexual identity and gender are never fixed and everything is permitted. He has fun telling it like it is - the comical approach, an admission of sorts.
Down here in the cellar… Meg Andrews investigates the obsessive nature of neurosis. Her personal fascinations are ironically packaged and presented in the manner of tasteless visual merchandising, blown up to mammoth proportions, surrounding us, smothering us with claustrophobia. In the shrine-like space we kneel at the altar of her martyrdom and feel anxious for the protagonist in this tawdry psychodrama.
Something slithers out from under that rock… Tom Dunn deals with the nature of violence. Who is the victim? Who the perpetrator? In his painting of Don King, promoter, fighter and killer, he celebrates this villain, placing him in the nightmarish claustrophobia of some sleazy Las Vegas dive - gasoline, Benzedrine, neon and nihilism. Elsewhere, his baroque, sadomasochistic photographs examine the nature of domination and submission and the blurring of boundaries between these extremes. A boot fetish bacchanalia is unfolding, but the relationship between the protagonists is unclear.
Let’s walk through the dark woods to that cottage... Cecilia Fogelberg’s installation recounts the story of the three little pigs, a classic fairy tale, which she now revisits as an adult. We are invited into the cottage where we find a hunter’s trophies on the wall - not only the plump heads of those smug little pigs, but that of the wolf as well. The conventional moral message from the original tale has been neatly subverted; there are no winners here, no easy divisions of right and wrong, good or bad. Such simple innocence is gone forever. And what is the significance of the objects that are placed in conjunction with the trophies. They create an unnerving sensation by their casual placement. The pigs look down on it all, self-righteous even in death and one longs for the sharp snap of the wolf’s jaws once more.
Quietly, down this winding track… Tony Cran’s dark painting evokes the savagery of nature, ‘red in tooth and claw’, but also touches deeper psychological buttons. An abstracted rural scene of superimposed figures and landscape unfolds to reveal a life and death saga. An owl flies across the canvas, as a stylized black rabbit glides across the top of the painting – like the image of Death in Watership Down. It is an archetypal symbol that is at once friendly and malevolent, touching all in the sweep of its trajectory. It is implacable and immense and we will all be gathered between its paws eventually.
The cupboard door creaks open and we find… Marita Hamalainen’s fetishised plastic wraps; a man’s suit standing proud, and a maternity dress. They are completely transparent; the wearer would be absolutely naked and exposed to our gaze. Strange, transparent puppets suggest the childhood of insubstantial children, not bound by the rules of the corporeal world. Elsewhere, a stuffed toy is transformed by casting it in bronze, preserving forever every stitch and imperfection in heavy metal. The works are shrouded in silence. They are from a parallel dimension, where solidity and absence are interchangeable.
Look! Up in the sky! A murder of crows! Brodie Ellis’ birds fly in a tight sphere. They hang in the air like an omen. Or perhaps it is the Omen. Or maybe they have emerged from Hitchcock’s The Birds. What is the purpose for their gathering? There is a lone white bird amongst them. Are they attacking it? Or is it their leader? Crows are super-intelligent. They are associated with witches. Their nests are very untidy and they have very loud voices. But here they are silent, endlessly revolving in their own gothic psychodrama, which is just as well. Imagine if they landed.
And now slowly open the dark cupboard under the sink, reach in and… Sean Richards has assembled creatures that spring from the depth of hell. Real (un)popular monsters (Osama Bin Laden in an alarming James Brown hairdo) jostle with monstrous creations from the id. Using collage, he maintains a stream of consciousness approach, which allows him to react to the deformity, disease and sexual disgust the images suggest. The resulting creatures are repulsive, writhing beings that spring from the unconscious in fine Surrealist tradition. They are made from images of flesh and sex, but they subvert their origins by becoming anti-flesh, anti-sex. He takes the fake glamour of pornography and twists it till it implodes.
Stop reading and see for yourself - Our monsters lurk everywhere, under your skin, under the bed, inside your head, and standing right next to you. They are our villains and our celebrated heroes. They are our insanity, our profanity, our insecurity and our confidence.
Walk around and draw yourself in… but don’t stand too close to edge of the bed….
Written by Sean Richards and Steve Cox. 2005
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