Rules of the Game - Double Take
Surface Gallery presents Double Take, the final installment of the Rules of the Game series of one week exhibitions of work from students and staff of the Fine Art course at Nottingham Trent University.
May 15th to May 19th 2007
The double-take phenomenon is investigated in this exhibition and it is this shared motivation rather than a unifying aesthetic that ties these artists together. All the works in their own way challenge one’s perception, demanding the viewer to reconsider that which is familiar and often overlooked.
Humorous, deceitful, dreamlike or enhancing the formal qualities of common objects, the works in this exhibition call upon our attention to the subconscious ‘rules’ of the order of things: spaces, materials and situations are manipulated and propose to look afresh at our environment and to re-imagine it.
The viewer’s perceptions will be challenged and toyed with in this exhibition. Ideas are explored by means of impersonation and perfidiousness. James Bowen and Tom Duggan erect a false door and wall in order to test and subvert our expectations of the exhibition space. Spatial intervention is also the concern of Katherine Webborn’s piece: a reconstructed sandwich board which challenges the traditional public domain. Alexandria Clark’s takes the role of the voyeur in her performative text, projecting her own thoughts, memories and muses, both past and present, on to the gallery wall via a large projector. Mirja Koponen and Elizabeth Teasdale similarly question the value of truth as they re-work the fictional and fairytale through their treatment of the everyday and documentary. Katherine Wojcik’s reconstruction of a series of defunct objects encourage the viewer to look beyond the purely material to allow for the invisible or the illusionary.
The incisive complexity of this exhibition encourages us to challenge the inertia brought about by the every day, the mundane and the overlooked. Only when we look again and embrace the double-take do we truly grasp the value of our environment.