Exhibitions

Venue: Generator, Dundee

Dates: April 2005

A three person exhibition engaged with the real and the fictive, trickery and fakery and the complex relationship between artist, viewer and artwork.

Lorna Macintyre creates constructions that mimic the functions of accepted structures within the art world. Previous installations have incorporated individual works within an overall structure that mirrors that context within which the work is displayed. Macintyre’s work is simultaneously concerned with this self-referentiality and in the possibility of creating a sense of character, or fragmented identity throughout a given installation. Macintyre wishes to lay bare her role as artist in the creation and display of her work, and her relationship with the viewer is something she is particularly conscious of in the process of making and exhibiting.

Clare Stephenson will be showing new wooden carvings along with drawings of clay sculptures on armatures. The clay forms depicted take allegorical forms as external structures, but are fictional composites of existing sculptures. For example, in a previous work call ‘The Eel’, the clay form is composed of neo-classical maquettes by Canova, while in ‘Wings’, a double helix from a caricature portrait of Louis XIV by Daumier. Stephenson’s works are essentially about working practice and an intellectual engagement with materials and object making. They both set up and question deterministic structures.

Jane Topping employs drawing, painting and writing to investigate the use of language, both visual and literary. Drawing upon art historical and literary references, Topping dissects the viewer’s relationship with language by presenting works which act as virtual poems, as momentary narratives which are ultimately given meaning by the viewer’s life experience. By experimenting with specifically chosen words, phrase and images, Topping combines them so that their implied meaning is muffled or mixed up.

Each aspect of the work simultaneously supports and contradicts the other and it is this conflict within each piece, between image and text, which creates a space, manipulates the perceived meaning of the work and gives the viewer a personal point of access. Topping’s images become props, letters and words standing as figures, and the whole page a window through which a semantic moment is constructed and played out.