Stories Being Told
12th March — 16th April 2011
Opening reception 11th March, 6 – 8 pm
Stories Being Told is an exhibition of works by Dorota Jurczak (b.1978), Peter Linde Busk (b.1973) and Ryan Mosley (b. 1980), which capture narrative moments from ambiguous worlds.
Dorota Jurczak’s etchings frequently employ dream perspective, the viewer hovering above disconcerting events unfolding beneath them. Another nightmarish scenario is played out in brightly coloured works where pieces of furniture have human faces, but are rooted to the spot, unable to flee or even express themselves. Peter Linde Busk’s images grow out of a frenzy of mark making. An accumulation of small gestures, some lines, some symbols, creates shadowy behemoths that loom but remain indistinct. If Jurczak’s characters are mute prisoners of their fates, and Linde Busk’s still coming into being, Ryan Mosley’s revel in their existence. Just one recurring element found on Mosley’s canvases is a top hat that could have been plucked from the head of Manet’s Absinthe Drinker (1859), which takes its place amid jumbles of possessed elements, characters of contradictory eras and societal strata coexisting in carnivalesque disorder.
The darkness, be it melancholia, anxiety or subversion, that haunts Jurczak, Linde Busk and Mosley’s works reminds us of earlier forms of story-telling, such as the tales collated by the Brothers Grimm. The Grimm collections united stories told throughout feudal European times when the continent was thickly forested, frequently plagueridden and barons were robbers. The gleefully chilling stories were not constrained by rationality like modern fictions. Indeed, since antiquity visions, fantasies and the imagination had been prized as sources of refined knowledge, till the advent of modern science debunked and devalued all that which was not empirical. It took Sigmund Freud to re-discover the lost territory of dreams and neuroses and to lay claim to its resources that can signal truths or urges hidden in the subconscious.
For Freud, the artist could journey into fantasy and return with his discoveries; in this exhibition Jurczak, Linde Busk and Mosley show the spoils of their ramblings through that taboo realm, to places that logic would blind us to, but that are as much a part of the present as rational life.
Aoife Rosenmeyer