EXHIBITION: Featuring Eri Itoi (糸井恵理) alongside Annie Attridge,  Jonathan Baldock,  Sarah Gillham,  Anthea Hamilton,  Mindy Lee,  Paul Westcombe.

25 February to 27 March, 2011

The blurb:
‘Seduction isn’t just beauty’s privilege.  The abject, the kitsch and the mundane are all potential triggers for desire; the further one gets from a canonical idea of pulchritude, the wilder the attraction can become.  Conceived like a museum of curios, Condensation stages this apparent paradox and invites the viewers to navigate the complex mechanics of seduction.  The female body is here fragmented and reconfigured like Hans Bellmer’s doll, or rendered functional like the Greek goddess in Dalí’s Venus with Drawers.  But it re-emerges stronger from these abuses – perhaps because, in line with the Surrealist tradition, these partial bodies have something of the psychological (self) portrait, made all the more accurate by multifarious transformations; perhaps because, as the outstanding details of inaccessible wholes, they gain in seductive power.

Most of the material used by the artists in Condensation – cheap fabric, found patterns and disposable crockery – is lifted from everyday paraphernalia, and turned into a springboard for the imagination.  There are no straightforward readymades though: the artists in the show commit as much to their primary sources as they do to their manual alterations. They seem to advocate the relevance of the handmade in a society dominated by the mass-produced.  Their use of crafts and found items also brings a palpable sense of domesticity to the works on display, one that is particularly unsettling when the pieces reference male giants of the Western art tradition.  In Condensation, the throwaway and the amorously assembled, the intimate and the historical collide.’

Danielle Arnaud Contemporary Art, 123 Kennington Road, Vauxhall, London.  SE11 6SF.
For more information please visit:
www.daniellearnaud.com