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Strange BeautyEncounters with beauty can transport us, if only momentarily, to other realms. Offering a glimpse into the paradoxical realm of an alluring yet disconcerting aesthetic, this exhibition celebrates the strangeness of beauty, its tantalising, dark and enigmatic dimensions. The participating artists are united by an interest in fantastic or ethereal imagery, each creating dream-like worlds populated by strange animals, contorted bodies and constructed landscapes. Strange beauty links a series of unique visions via a shared aesthetic that has mesmeric, unsettling and enticing undercurrents. Mysterious and inscrutable, like the characters of a secret code, the shiny black acrylic cut-outs that make up Colin Duncan's Lolly pop forest (2004) spill and scatter across the gallery wall. Soliciting explanation and resembling a range of possible symbols or objects - including the binary building blocks '1' and '0', balloons, and even a landscape of trees - these simple forms shift and reverberate in the slippage between one and many. They form a curious, almost animate field in flux, flickering between the organic, artificial and imaginary; appearing slightly menacing but also curiously beautiful, like hallucinatory shadows shifting across the gallery wall. Similarly, Viv Miller explores the dense terrain of visual representation, mingling sublime landscapes and intimate still lives with computer inspired graphics and cartoon-style flatness. Like Duncan, Miller's paintings conjure pathways between abstract and representational fi elds, referencing contemporary and historical modes of image-making. In her otherworldly Slo mo painting no.3 (2006-7), branches sweep down across the picture plane, garlanded by a gentle spray of leaves. Blocking the spaces between interlocking branches with fl at pastel hues to portray sunlight, Miller creates an image composed like the panes in a stained glass window, the abstract elements both building and breaking down the pictorial field. In Volcano (2005), Miller depicts a green volcano during an oddly un-climactic eruption, the action suspended mid-blast like a manga animation stuck on single cell. Miller's volcano somehow never completely realises its explosive promise. As strange and beautiful visual conundrums, her paintings explore the 'problems' and conventions of representation. Like interior worlds where dense layers of image-making traditions interact and are unsettled, Miller's paintings seem to simultaneously question and celebrate the alchemical and revelatory potential of the painted world. With complex, dense compositions like opulent, intricately worked tapestries Kathryn Del Barton's paintings, drawings and soft sculptures are dazzlingly detailed, macabre, even ecstatic mysteries. With disconcerting and mesmerising intensity Barton's work combines beauty, fear, vulnerability and desire in a complex chemistry. Wide-eyed, wispily thin women are depicted entwined with uncanny creatures, and set adrift in image fields of wildly chaotic patterns and flora. In Making love with love version 1 2004 Barton's delicate and palely rendered female nude is erotically exposed, while a small bird drinks her liquid. Clusters of luxuriant, brightly painted pansies appear in the foreground of the image, adding to the dreamy mise-en-scene, however the image also operates as a disorienting meditation on the sensual and the abject dimensions of beauty, undermining simplistic notions of the feminine. Charles Robb's Extension (2005) and Protrusion II (2005) combine his fascination with the monumental traditions of the sculptural bust and the contrivances of the exploratory self-portrait. His grotesquely 'sliced' sculptural self-portraits are off the pedestal and wedged between wall and floor. They are finely detailed, seductively pristine, yet erratically, and inexplicably, scribbled upon or defaced - obscured and veiled by uncontrolled gestural marks in high-key colours. Spontaneous, almost child-like interventions or eruptions seem to have overtaken the hand of the artist. Jennifer Mills' humorous images of delicately rendered bats in Batman suits and goats in racing snoods conflate detailed depictions of creatures from the natural world with the costumes, cartoons and narratives of childhood, rendered in the appealing complementary and clashing colours of consumerist packaging. Racing stripes (green/orange) (2007) depicts a goat drawn in exquisite detail. While the underdrawing is skilfully rendered, Mills' goat dons an absurd orange and green striped balaclava. Convention meets eccentricity here, as animal becomes confused with human, culture with nature, innocence with worldliness, and the observational is confl ated with the surreal and the expressionistic. In a playful tussle of elements and opposites Mills creates images that are disquietingly beautiful and curiously moving. Bursting with vivid detail and iridescent colour James Morrison's paintings are jewel-like compositions that radiate a sense of utopian optimism as well as cataclysmic dread. Optically and compositionally disjunctive, they hang in a delicate balance. Their untraceable postcard and documentary style subject matter and titles are mysterious and suggestive, both out-of-place and out-of-time. Foreground, middle ground and background compress into flat fields of ornamental complexity, and contain numerous uncanny, unsettling twists. Peering out of elaborately constructed new worlds, inquisitive animals meet our gaze with uncertain stares. While there is a persistent sense all is not right within Morrison's peculiar, sensuously painted worlds, his beguiling images assert a strange form of beauty which is at once completely invented and utterly grounded in reality - simultaneously fantastical and worldly. Transporting us into imaginary and meticulously fabricated worlds, the artists participating in Strange Beauty provide us with glimpses into alternate realms, where the paradoxical play of a beauty that both enchants and repels dismantles our world of appearances. Melissa Keys |
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