Matt Franks, Sheena Macrae, Richard Ducker

Private view: Friday, 18 January 2008: 6 - 9 pm

MATT FRANKS: “The intensification of common dumb cartoon imagery is at the heart of Matt Frank’s sculptures. Taking conventional reduced two dimensional renderings of images such as skulls, nuclear bomb explosions, swirls and vortexes, Franks solidifies these graphic simplifications into three dimensional forms in ludicrously bright acidic or pastel colours. Composited into intricate near baroque, comical and outlandish objects, Franks’ sculptures don’t seem to be depictions of either straightforwardly inanimate things nor of creatures in their own right. Rather they seem to be bodies that lie somewhere between the two, hybrids with their own mysterious exuberance.” -- © Suhail Malik, 2004

SHEENA MACRAE: Sheena Macrae works the art of compression by playing with our societies' fascination with speed, entertainment, information and nostalgia. She manipulates the product of the cultural industries, takes possession of it and, twisting the principle of post-production, becomes a sort of VJ (Video-Jockey), somewhere between Christian Marclay and Douglas Gordon, appro priating and parodying standardised forms of narration, Hollywood clichés or economic constraints underlying all-powerful Entertainment. Her new wall-based work is founded on the urban film legend that cinema projectionists will steal their favourite movie frames. She has meticulously researched this field to find some of these surreptitious collectors with images that span from Annie Hall to Brigitte Bardot.

“The quality of the epic always resides in a single breathless moment. As if the universe were anchored by sync points, where for just one video frame, one thirtieth of a second, all of its truths are revealed in fragmented, incomprehensively overwhelming glory. It’s an indefinable sentiment, expansive beyond language, residing in the intangible realms of the metaphysical. A place not unlike your tv screen. Perhaps Sheena Macrae is a diviner; her ability to extricate the essence from the epic is uncanny…Like a drug or a diamond, a screen-size cosmos for the taking. Ergonomic, perfect, and larger than life.” -- © Patricia Ellis, excerpt from Flatpack TV, 2005

RICHARD DUCKER: “The use of cement in Richard Ducker’s most recent sculptures emphasises a kind of death, or a modernist monumentality, but the objects it coats and with which it is juxtaposed evoke nostalgia, myths soaked in dreams, and fairy tales gone wrong. If a domestic interior is evoked, it is one in which homely things have sprouted aggressive appendages, grown unexpected textures, or multiplied into viral aggregates, as if to embody the nightmares that commodity fetishes might dream of if they fell asleep. Like Proust’s madeleine dipped in tea, they evoke memories and sensations according to a logic that combines cultural association with phenomenological fantasies of sensual experiences, often clashing within the same piece…Emotionally evocative without ever telling a clear story, affecting without being obvious, Ducker’s sculptures seem to be there with the mute theatricality of minimalism, yet to engage with notions of transformation. With simple formal means, they excavate fears, anxieties and desires associated with the most visceral of physical sensations – attraction and repulsion, pleasure and pain, need and self-sufficiency. The work keeps referring back to the body, a missing body we as viewers cannot help but imagine filling-in for with our own, transforming it into the ill-fitting piece of a jigsaw we are trying in vain to complete with our presence.” -- (excerpt) © Patrizia Di Bello, 2007

Matt Franks, Sheena MacRae, Richard Ducker