Mink Schmink
Emma Barrow Veneer, 2008, polystyrene, plaster, spray paint
17 Jan - 15 Feb 2009
curated by Chiara Williams & Debra Wilson
"What have you got if you haven't got love?" (Eartha Kitt, Mink Schmink)
Just like a timeless tune, or a legendary French perfume, this group exhibition has top notes of glamour, style and bling, mid notes of aspiration, beauty and mortality and lingering just a little longer than is comfortable are base notes of vanity, envy and greed.
Mink Schmink oscillates between high and low culture and draws in the gold-digging, superficial, fake, embroidered, wishful, delusional and longing worlds that fill our emotional voids.
This show is a colourful blast for all the senses, with sculpture, painting, photography, print and performance from Emma Barrow, Deni Francis, Charlie Gates, Phil Illingworth, Denise Mahon, Eleanor Moulsdale, Starchild, Boa Swindler, David Wightman, Chiara Williams and Irlanda Zantone.
curated by Chiara Williams & Debra Wilson
"What have you got if you haven't got love?" (Eartha Kitt, Mink Schmink)
Just like a timeless tune, or a legendary French perfume, this group exhibition has top notes of glamour, style and bling, mid notes of aspiration, beauty and mortality and lingering just a little longer than is comfortable are base notes of vanity, envy and greed.
Mink Schmink oscillates between high and low culture and draws in the gold-digging, superficial, fake, embroidered, wishful, delusional and longing worlds that fill our emotional voids.
This show is a colourful blast for all the senses, with sculpture, painting, photography, print and performance from Emma Barrow, Deni Francis, Charlie Gates, Phil Illingworth, Denise Mahon, Eleanor Moulsdale, Starchild, Boa Swindler, David Wightman, Chiara Williams and Irlanda Zantone.
In the 1950s Eartha Kitt, at her gold-digging best, sings in Mink Schmink of all the material things one desires and concludes, ‘What have you got if you haven't got love?' This question is still current today, in our culture of WAGS, instant celebrity and status symbols.
There was an advert circulating recently from the World Gold Council featuring a gold bar inscribed with the words ‘Only Gold Is Divine'. Irlanda Zantone features this same advert (cut from Italian Vogue: Solo l'Oro e' Divino ) in her transcription of Hieronymus Bosch's The Seven Deadly Sins and the Four Last Things, 1485 . Gold has symbolically been associated with extremes of evil and purity. With it she passes comment on the greed that has led to the current economic gloom.
Spanning centuries and cultures, gold is an international currency. In times of economic unease gold is seen as a safe bet for investors. So, just when symbols of luxury would seem to be farthest from the minds of those of us trying to scrimp and save, just when property, stocks and shares are threatened, gold and other luxury items become in fact more desirable, reliable and valuable.
Art is another luxury investment, but one which is harder to reliably value, a case in point is Hirst's Diamond Skull For the Love of God priced at £50million a couple of years ago.
Boa Swindler makes a deliberately crude reference to this in For the Love of Money questioning a work's ‘added value' and reminding us in the vanitas tradition that ‘you can't take it with you'. She also looks at feelings of loss of power and inadequacy in Champagne Cork, where for some high fliers with everything money can buy, what have you got if you haven't got a big cock? In contrast She felt something stir inside (Love Bomb) explores the transformative power of love above all these material and physical concerns.
Just as love is transformative, Emma Barrow's work is alchemical. She takes found, valueless materials such as cardboard and polystyrene and transforms them into golden objects of desire, imbuing them with an importance and preciousness that appeals to the magpie in all of us. Simper and Veneer have sumptuous, glistening surfaces that seduce all our senses. Each piece is unique, its outcome dependant on the properties of its base material.
Eleanor Moulsdale similarly takes common materials – pins and cotton – and through a painstaking process of many hours and weeks creates a shimmering surface reminiscent of a couture fabric, beautiful and captivating. On closer inspection, the process of labour reveals itself slowly, the thousands of pins become discernable and the process of oxidisation and the resultant spots of rust give the work a life of its own.
There was an advert circulating recently from the World Gold Council featuring a gold bar inscribed with the words ‘Only Gold Is Divine'. Irlanda Zantone features this same advert (cut from Italian Vogue: Solo l'Oro e' Divino ) in her transcription of Hieronymus Bosch's The Seven Deadly Sins and the Four Last Things, 1485 . Gold has symbolically been associated with extremes of evil and purity. With it she passes comment on the greed that has led to the current economic gloom.
Spanning centuries and cultures, gold is an international currency. In times of economic unease gold is seen as a safe bet for investors. So, just when symbols of luxury would seem to be farthest from the minds of those of us trying to scrimp and save, just when property, stocks and shares are threatened, gold and other luxury items become in fact more desirable, reliable and valuable.
Art is another luxury investment, but one which is harder to reliably value, a case in point is Hirst's Diamond Skull For the Love of God priced at £50million a couple of years ago.
Boa Swindler makes a deliberately crude reference to this in For the Love of Money questioning a work's ‘added value' and reminding us in the vanitas tradition that ‘you can't take it with you'. She also looks at feelings of loss of power and inadequacy in Champagne Cork, where for some high fliers with everything money can buy, what have you got if you haven't got a big cock? In contrast She felt something stir inside (Love Bomb) explores the transformative power of love above all these material and physical concerns.
Just as love is transformative, Emma Barrow's work is alchemical. She takes found, valueless materials such as cardboard and polystyrene and transforms them into golden objects of desire, imbuing them with an importance and preciousness that appeals to the magpie in all of us. Simper and Veneer have sumptuous, glistening surfaces that seduce all our senses. Each piece is unique, its outcome dependant on the properties of its base material.
Eleanor Moulsdale similarly takes common materials – pins and cotton – and through a painstaking process of many hours and weeks creates a shimmering surface reminiscent of a couture fabric, beautiful and captivating. On closer inspection, the process of labour reveals itself slowly, the thousands of pins become discernable and the process of oxidisation and the resultant spots of rust give the work a life of its own.
Phil Illingworth 's piece Black and White and Read All Over started its life as a found black and white image of a 50s pinup, which Illingworth then pixelated, hand coloured and reproduced large in reference to the commoditisation of beauty and the contemporary aspirations of young women.
David Wightman's work also embraces nostalgia and aspiration. At first glance the paintings appear simply to formally reference abstraction and pop art in the repetitive use of the target motif and in the play of colour, but the use of textured wallpaper personalises the work and alludes to domesticity and working-class interiors. These formalist and decorative concerns cohabit the paintings, making us question both class and taste (in life and art) and the rigidity of differing painterly traditions. The work is aspirational because it seeks to be more than the sum of its formal values.
Starchild creates vibrant, busy collages with paint and collected vintage imagery. Cross-cultural retro references and graffiti-like mark-making collide in a nostalgic yet contemporary, colourful aesthetic. In The Don we are presented with aspiration in the form of the power of myth and the hero's journey.
Denise Mahon creates photographic composites of areas in nocturnal Hackney. Reflecting the property boom & bust, redevelopment, promise and loss, her work involves the transformation and positioning of layers into a world where colour and light work together to give atmosphere and narrative.
‘I should have been a pair of ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silent seas' and ‘those were pearls that were his eyes' are quotes from T.S. Eliot that spring to mind when standing before Charlie Gates's surrealist piece Popular Culture. Hands emerge from the centre of a dark, bullet-studded dartboard, luring us with pearls and jewels; crabs and dead fish jostle with the riches, reminding us again of the ephemeral and transient nature of life.
Mink Schmink therefore encapsulates a world of colour, hope and aspiration. Gold and glistening surfaces, nostalgia, the futility of pleasure and the certainty of death are all present, but the circle is the most persistently recurring motif. It is a symbol of wholeness, which ultimately and subconsciously mirrors our desire for fulfilment and completeness.
David Wightman's work also embraces nostalgia and aspiration. At first glance the paintings appear simply to formally reference abstraction and pop art in the repetitive use of the target motif and in the play of colour, but the use of textured wallpaper personalises the work and alludes to domesticity and working-class interiors. These formalist and decorative concerns cohabit the paintings, making us question both class and taste (in life and art) and the rigidity of differing painterly traditions. The work is aspirational because it seeks to be more than the sum of its formal values.
Starchild creates vibrant, busy collages with paint and collected vintage imagery. Cross-cultural retro references and graffiti-like mark-making collide in a nostalgic yet contemporary, colourful aesthetic. In The Don we are presented with aspiration in the form of the power of myth and the hero's journey.
Denise Mahon creates photographic composites of areas in nocturnal Hackney. Reflecting the property boom & bust, redevelopment, promise and loss, her work involves the transformation and positioning of layers into a world where colour and light work together to give atmosphere and narrative.
‘I should have been a pair of ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silent seas' and ‘those were pearls that were his eyes' are quotes from T.S. Eliot that spring to mind when standing before Charlie Gates's surrealist piece Popular Culture. Hands emerge from the centre of a dark, bullet-studded dartboard, luring us with pearls and jewels; crabs and dead fish jostle with the riches, reminding us again of the ephemeral and transient nature of life.
Mink Schmink therefore encapsulates a world of colour, hope and aspiration. Gold and glistening surfaces, nostalgia, the futility of pleasure and the certainty of death are all present, but the circle is the most persistently recurring motif. It is a symbol of wholeness, which ultimately and subconsciously mirrors our desire for fulfilment and completeness.
