“Keeping Your End Up” is an exhibition of recent UEL Graduates, who have gained recognition as emerging talents. The exhibition will highlight the artists’ ability to alter our experience of the world through a subtle manipulation of everyday objects and no small amount of humour.
With “Touchdown”, Ralph Dorey utilizes the formal qualities of material, colour, form and site to create an autonomous object. For the artist each piece is an imaginary organ, a once functioning catalyst now redundant and existing as a phenomenalist picture plane. His work has been described as “vivaciously visceral, anthropomorphically awkward, contextually voracious and frequently large”. Dorey lives and works in London, where he is currently studying sculpture at The Royal College of Art.
Bryony Gillard creates site sensitive installations that control space, body and action. Gillard is interested in her work acting as a social mediator creating situations that enable a physical dialogue between individuals. “Tug Trap” is a human sized, transparent, bell shaped cage. A participant will pull a rope to lift the cage and another person will venture into the space under the cage. When the rope is released, the participant will be trapped – in an absurd clear prison. The artist will also be exhibiting a series of drawings, illustrating her many ideas and feats of imagination.
Guy Oliver presents two new video pieces for “Keeping You’re End Up” which display both his unique humour, and sense of high drama.
“Warriors Don’t Cry (yrC t’noD sroirraW)” features Oliver’s on-screen alter-ego, the ghost of former wrestling superstar, The Ultimate Warrior, who takes the viewer on a journey of love and loss through popular song. Using the distinctive Ultimate Warrior face-paint motif, the film places traditional self-portraiture in the context of a pop-video or YouTube karaoke performance.
In “Boddington: His Thoughts Can Kill”, shots of Boddington, Oliver’s pet cat, and long term collaborative partner are ‘seamlessly’ inter-cut with scenes from the 1981 film Scanners :
“The piece aims to answer the age-old mystery of, what is going on inside the mind of the average
house-hold cat”.
Stuart Robinson’s work tries to explore the possibilities within objects, were they to exceed the confines of their assumed properties and functions. “The Four Course-men” is a photographic quartet of spewing condiments, as household sauces and spreads appear to be bursting out from weak points. The normally passive items suddenly become highly volatile with unexpected outcomes.
In ‘Untitled (NestBox)’ a garden nesting box extrudes an unfeasible quantity of a mysterious red substance into the gallery space. The piece continues Robinson’s interest in producing work that encourages curiosity, and intrigue.
:::Midnightblue:::
