Alastair Mackie / Alison Moffett

For his first solo exhibition at MWprojects, AAlastair Mackie will be presenting a body of new works. Mackie’s practice likes contradiction. It brings together disparate elements in meticulously crafted sculptures such as Mud Hut, 2005, which models Capital Hill in Washington DC with a Medieval construction technique consisting of manure, straw and soil from the artist’s garden. What’s your problem Iceman, 2005, instead, is the fatal meeting of the design of a rising sun from a US fighter pilot helmet, a human skull that is base for a mosaic mask, a traditional technique used by the Aztecs to represent Tezcatlipoca, god of rulers, warriors and sorcerers. Like for the ancient Mexican civilisation, Mackie’s sculpture makes use of turquoise - a stone used by the Aztecs to decorate objects to associate metaphorically the fossilised appearance of the skull with contemporary events. Through the combination of conflicting elements, Mackie does not aim to critique but leaves judgement open to the viewer, confronting them with the internal conflict created by the works. From a distance, his works appear as beautiful objects, the result of painstaking construction processes but, on closer inspection, the true nature of the materials is revealed: what seemed to be a cute toy mouse is, in fact, a model made of remains found in owls’ nests of devoured mice (Mouse Fur Mouse, 2004). Mackie aims to highlight the contradiction between nature’s beauty and harshness. The work also carries the artist’s political concerns with warfare and the hypocrisy imbued in the Western democratic systems.

Alastair Mackie has been included in numerous group shows including: If you go down to the woods today, Rockwell Gallery, London; RB Bursary Show, RSB, London; Selected Sculpture, MWprojects, London; New Blood: New Young Artists, New Acquisitions, The Saatchi Gallery, London.

A recent graduate from the Slade School of Fine Art (London), AAlison Moffett presents a new large-scale pencil drawing (Those who were left behind, 2005). The piece is a world of artifice, intricately detailed depiction of an impossible vertical fall into the void of the image, turned possible through meticulous rendering. Moffett’s twisted stories whisper out of the darker parts of one’s mind, flowing from tales long forgotten. They elude the defining walls placed around reality. The young American artist (*1979) juxtaposes what is known and understood with the unexpected and the fantastic, slipping over the edge, ever so slightly, into the uncanny. Madness through compulsive perfections seems to be only a step away. Beauty and serenity seduce the viewer as a bait that masks a deeper melancholy.

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Alastair Mackie, Terror Firma

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Project Space: Alison Moffett