"Doorway for Princess Thousandbeauty" Daniel Lehan 2009

Thursday to Sunday 12 noon to 6pm, to Sunday 26 July

Work by three artists who share an interest in the re-processing of existing cultural production to create realities of varying degrees of conviction and unease; reflections of imaginative worlds built from material culture, or even immaterial mediations and representations, rather than from ‘natural’ or ‘direct’ experience.

Daniel Lehan’s installation “Doorway for Princess Thousandbeauty” transposes the romantic notion of the artist struggling to realize his vision into a bathetic, yet perversely difficult, attempt to bring a fantasy of a blooming wilderness (taken from the 1960s children’s TV serial “the Singing Ringing Tree”) into the objective world. A video shows Lehan ‘as’ a bear (the bear in the serial was itself a prince transformed into a bear, and was always obviously a man in a bear costume) making flowers, doves and a magical tree, the physical components of the piece on display. Is the viewer presented with a documentation of a (bizarre) process for making art objects, or with props used in a performance video, or yet something else ? The audience is left negotiating between three realities: the objects in the gallery, the original fiction they’re tied to, and the new narrative (whose relationship to truth and fiction is unclear) through which they’ve been salvaged.

Suzanne Moxhay’s “Cablecar” presents us with an ideal, if dystopian, world of wilderness as spectacle. As real as the most convincing of dreams, yet simultaneously suggestive of a missing film that might have married the Western with Tarkovsky’s “Stalker’, “Cablecar” is even more radical and poignant in its constructedness. Derived from a three dimensional collage of cut-outs, assembled and re-photographed in the studio by Moxhay using her extensive archive of found imagery, the piece’s transposition and reorganization of photographic material across time and space (both real and illusory), undermines any remaining sense of the objectivity of photographic landscape, and further problematises our attachment to straightforward readings of photographic space in general. In creating an image that represents a landscape existing only in the imagination, while at another level remaining a document of the physical material of photography and its malleability, Moxhay has crafted the most sophisticated of double-takes and raised fresh questions about photographic ontology.

In Nicholas Symes’ “Driftwood 09”, processes of appropriation and distortion take a more physical, and more personal, form. Constructed by combining sections of Thames driftwood and other discarded timber and then working on the assemblage with hand and machine tools and by other means, Symes has reproduced the effect of natural weathering processes on an imaginary unvalued object. Like Charles Ray, Symes is an artist on whose work minimalism and high modernist sculpture has had a significant but paradoxical influence, and “Driftwood 09” is a labour-intensive hiding in plain sight that celebrates formal and material qualities while cheekily masquerading as an ‘authentic’, and perhaps even ‘ugly’ found object (one that, in a double irony, wears its composite provenance on its sleeve).

Daniel Lehan is an artist, writer and performer. His work has been shown extensively in the UK and overseas (Netherlands, USA, Lithuania, Sweden) including shows at The Public, ArtSway, Studio Voltaire and Witte de With, Rotterdam). Since graduating from the Royal Academy Schools in 2007, Suzanne Moxhay has exhibited in Australia, Italy and Poland, and her work is held by major public and private collections. Nicholas Symes’ work has regularly been shown at Wiebke Morgan and elsewhere in the UK and Canada.