Exhibitions

Venue: Transmission, Glasgow

Dates: February 2005

Notes: two person show

Kate Davis presents new work at Transmission. Her work revisits history – specific points in time, art, artist and the impact they have on her daily life.

Davis’ domestic scale works look at the relationship between subject and object. In these recent works like ‘Three Form Study’ (2004), ‘Participator’ (2004), and the ‘Participant Series’ (2004), drawings and sculpture have been utilized to create a three dimensional world complemented and completed by the addition of the viewer. By involving sculptural elements Davis places the power balance between the viewer and her drawings in the hands of the viewer. In doing so she offers an alternative pattern which is open to multiple readings. Previous work conveyed anthropomorphic view of the objects which inhabit our immediate environment and animate the space we occupy. These surreal hybrids, a merging of both object and body part, suggest a mise-en-scene, tapping into the potential state of objects and their imaginary narratives. In the works for Transmission, The Player Series, Davis invites the viewer to enter the court and to take the stage too.

Henrik Olesen’s artworks question the sexually political effects of everyday conventions. Contemporary and historical material serves as the starting point of this inquiry. These materials include visual and textual representations drawn from the fields of architecture, the history of industrialization, the imposition of legally sanctioned punishment, verdicts handed down by courts of law, the geographic and demographic distribution of capital, the natural sciences, and the history of art. Olesen uses the techniques of appropriation, manipulation or contextual shifting to explore the theme of the stigmatization, criminalization, and repression of homosexuality.

The work at Transmission entitled 1935 1922 (2003) comprises several parts. The group of artworks includes a series of collages, which refer to two pictorial novels by Surrealist Max Ernst: La femme des 100 tetes (1934). The ensemble also includes a collection of material showing various phrases in the development of the topic. Whereas the showcases highlight the selective nature of the preserving and collecting (both of which are strongly influenced by chance and capital), the collages shift the narratives from an originally heterosexual fixation towards many-faceted homosexual scenarios.