|
David Risley Gallery: Roderick Harris - Fugue - 7 Mar 2008 to 6 Apr 2008 Current Exhibition |
||||
|
Roderick Harris
Fugue. Audience 1 (close up) 6 x 4.5cm Inkjet, Watercolour and Glitter on paper 2008 |
|||
|
||||
|
||||
|
Roderick Harris | Fugue 7 March - 6 April | Preview 6 March David Risley Gallery is proud to present a new body of work by Roderick Harris. David Risley�s first independently organised exhibition at Zwemmer Gallery, London �Showdown� was a solo show of work made by Harris following his graduation from the Royal College of Art in 2000. Fugue will be Harris� first solo show for 4 years. Over the past year Harris has been photographing and re-working footage of Michael Jackson performing �Smooth Criminal� from his �Dangerous� World Tour of 1993. Shooting directly from the screens surface, anomalous digital effects are created and a foggy, electronic texture resembling vintage or �psychic� photography emerges as a digital ghost of a ghost - further liquefied through painterly interpretation. The collective title for this body of work �Fugue� derives from the Latin fuga � related to fugere (to flee). In music it denotes a type of contrapuntal composition most highly developed during the Baroque. In psychology it denotes a dreamlike altered state of consciousness that is dissociative � characterised by flight from personal identity as a response to trauma or stress. Harris identified this performance as an effective lens through which an ongoing fascination with a network of psychological, esoteric, existential, pictorial and painterly connections converging around the notion of fugue could be explored. The stage performance is read as a highly orchestrated ritualisation of a surrogate persona analogous to the logic of personal fugue - as the notion of fugue itself is read as analogous to a wider, collective situation. Experience of fugue state typically expressed as that of the �puppet zombie� holds an uncanny relevance in light of the logic of Jackson�s earlier �Thriller�. Pyrotechnics, spotlights, dry-ice and shadows, feature as centrally as performers but distanced from their original identity and context invite readings less than theatrical or banal. A hallucinatory transmutation bordering on the hyper-religious emerges, its participants caught up in a performance of uncertain currency. The star of this spectacle fails to appear as icon to be worshipped or object of lampoon, but as an obscured and elusive fragment, a microcosmic creature (and audience) in dissociative flight playing out a game of losing itself on stage as within the materiality of a dissolved miniature painterly adventure. |
||||
re-title.com
International contemporary art
SIGN UP FOR NEWSLETTERS
SIGN UP for ARTIST MEMBERSHIP
SIGN UP for GALLERY MEMBERSHIP
Click on the map to search the directory