Exhibitions

Venue: Milton Keynes Gallery, Milton Keynes

Dates: 21st September–4th November 2007

Preview: 21st September 2007, 5.30pm

This exhibition presents a selection of recent sculptures, drawings and ceramic panels that illustrates Frost’s interest in the conflation of modern technology and mass-production with his distinctive hand-made aesthetic.

Frost’s ‘Adults’ are large rock-like sculptures that depict the design of well-known consumer products that we may associate with a certain adult sophistication and social etiquette, such as After Eights, Ryvita and Twining’s tea. Formed from polystyrene and covered in hundreds of pieces of shattered ceramic tiles, these sculptures, imbued with a light-hearted comical charge, are at once extraordinary and mundane. Through their method of production and use of mosaic tiling, the sculptures relate to the well-intentioned community projects that the artist participated in as a teenager in the late 1980’s. In this respect ‘Adults’ evoke the idea of personal, domestic consumption, yet speak the language of municipal, public art.

His use of the mosaic bears a formal relationship with the pixel and the bitmap imagery which he appropriates for creating his self-portrait drawings. The computer software provides a technological counterpoint to the delicate, personal nature of the final work. The title of Frost’s series, ‘Blind Drawings’, refers in part to the process of making an image from the reverse. The drawings create a tension between the very personal subject matter and the mechanical process of the making of the drawings.

‘I’m interested in the techniques that are a little artless. Anyone could do it. Yet, the subject matter is personal and the photos are taken by me. Images are of my friends, my studio or myself.’

Frost uses computer technology to scan images and convert them to bitmap print outs of coded grids of information. The drawings are punctured from the reverse with a mass of tiny pin pricks. Colour and form appear once metallic enamel paint is applied to the reverse of the drawing, seeping through to create a jewel-like surface.

‘Format Wars’ is a single work divided into two parts that augments the ‘Adults’ series. As a two-part work it conveys a variety of oppositions such as the domestic versus the public, the digital versus the analogue, the intimate versus the exposed, the defined versus the unclear – this is emphasised by one part being placed within the gallery and the other mounted high on the gallery’s exterior rear wall. Embedded within the ceramic-tiled surfaces are the symbols for the HDDVD and Blu-ray formats. Such collision between Frost’s reference to the stuff of domestic DIY with the promise and sophistication of digital advancement is both playful and poignant.

This exhibition is in partnership with ArtSway, Hampshire, where Alex Frost is artist-in-residence from 10 August – 17 October 2007.