19 Jan 2008 to 23 Feb 2008
Hours : Tuesday - Saturday 11 - 6 pm
PREVIEW 18TH JAN 6 – 9 PM
Agency Contemporary
15A Cremer Street
E2 8HD
London
United Kingdom
Europe
p: +44 (0) 207 729 6249
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w: www.theagencygallery.co.uk
top : Casey McAree Installation Views, 2007 STAG, Light Installation bottom : Patrick Goddard, We Regretfully Decline Your Invitation Sculpture, jesmonite, paint, steel, concrete, 165 x 126 x 90 cm
CASEY&MCAREE Heavier than a Coffin on your Shoulder 19 JAN - 23 FEB 08 PREVIEW 18TH JAN 6 – 9 PM S.T.O.R.A.G.E: PATRICK GODDARD
The Agency is pleased to present a new collaborative installation and series of works by Irish artist duo Casey&McAree.in the main space and new sculptural works by the English artist Patrick Goddard in S.T.O.R.A.G.E.
CASEY&MCAREE Heavier than a Coffin on your Shoulder
Casey&McAree’s work rises from post-punk inspirations such as Joy Division’s sound as well as references to the Irish troubled historical and cultural legacy. The work is highly theatrical, the installation functions akin to a mise-en-scene both as a complete vision as well as paying credence to the making-of. For Mona Casey and Paul McAree the collaborative/ performative process of making work is as important as the final piece itself. Hence the exhibition begins with a video diptych documenting a performance, continues with a light-piece spelling Screaming Skulls Putrid Hatred and culminates in a large sculptural installation. The sculpture rises from a path of latex skulls and reveals an apocalyptic rider on a stag. Made from cardboard remnants the life-size stag is both regal and dilapidated. The faceless rider wears a dunce or Capirote, a conical hat, which during the Spanish Inquisition was given to heretics to wear in order to ridicule them but later took on another dark meaning with its association with the Ku Klux Klan. The Stag also has iconographic meanings, both within Celtic mythology and later as part of Christian iconography. St Eustace saw a stag with a cross appearing between his antlers. This inspired his conversion to Christianity and subsequent persecution and death. The artists play with poignant iconography, religious and historic connotations, albeit transposed into a diasporic world where materials are not precious, yet thoughts and cultural ciphers inherently remain powerful. Casey&McAree are evoking a world of dubious morals, danger and death in a gothic manner, which becomes a stage set for the world’s malaise recounted with images. The dark iconographic connotations also echo more recent transgressions against humanity in Iraq. Casey & McAree’s Irish sensibility translates this in a poignant manner of remembering continuous resistance to the eradication of indigenous cultural values. The work comments on global identities being forged through localized wars and rapid re-alignment of cultures through external influences and conflict. Playing on multiple meanings their works become universal. In parallel their sub-cultural references to graffiti and music as well as the poverty of materials used speak of the transformation of iconography into a contemporary unstable environment. Whilst both artists pursue their independent practice, Paul McAree as a painter and Mona Casey as a multimedia artist, they come together regularly to create a folk-like rendition of their common cultural references. Casey&McAree’s common practice comes across like a powerful exorcism. Together they find the strength to dispel popular myths, disseminate inciting truths and find a new language of visual expression, which conveys these concerns with a rigorous and yet poetic conceptual language. Paul McAree and Mona Casey have made collaborative works since 2001. In 2005 they founded Colony, an artist run space in Birmingham, where they have shown alongside a host of invited artists.
S.T.O.R.A.G.E Patrick Goddard We Regretfully Decline Your Invitation
The Agency is pleased to present the young British sculptor Patrick Goddard (*1984) with a first solo show in S.T.O.R.A.G.E. He will exhibit a new sculptural piece as well as related works in a small installation. His figurative sculptures take their cue from a Kafkaesque world of waking nightmares and surreal scenarios, as well as modern writing such as Beckett and Pinter. Goddard cites the banal and translates it into parallel universe where emotions and a sense of unease take over. He is fascinated by the ordinary guy and creates a pathology of a man’s inner life, where both tragic and comic extremes take over. We Regretfully Decline Your Invitation depicts a young man without trousers but still formally dressed in a pinstripe shirt hunched over the spikes of a garden fence. The piece is quite farcical, the title leaves things open for interpretation. Other works depict everyday objects such as the ceramic laptop, which looks like it has slightly melted. His sculptures play on dark narratives and yet they are imbued with spontaneous humour. Much like Erwin Wurm’s works are derived from performance Goddard’s works are inspired by theatre; seductive, funny and thought-provoking at the same time.
Goddard has shown within the UK, participated in the group show Barely Human with Enrique Marty and Jemima Brown and will be included in EVERY BODY, in Vestfossen Kunstlaboratorium, Norway in May 2008.
