Opening: Friday, 24 February 2006. From 7.00 to 9.30 p.m.
From 24 February to 31 March 2006. Opening hours: Tuesday to
Friday: 11.00-1.30 / 2.30-6.30 – Saturday: 10.30-1.30.
Press Release
Gallery A : MAT COLLISHAW “Ydle Young”
The recurring themes in Mat Collishaw’s artistic production are, once again, the analysis of images and their seductive and illusory nature. To differing degrees, images may appear as being constructed through simple technological instruments, like photographs, or through other instruments, like videos, which are more suitable for representing reality.
The way in which Collishaw constructs his images wishes to unveil their construction process and to conceal it at the same time, in order for the ambiguous seduction of an image to convey its true meaning. In this process, a major role is played also by the historic and cultural connotations of the elements making up the image or of its materials. The series of photographs portraying Indian children is an excellent example of the time “collapse” existing between the contemporary subject and the iconic connotations of the Victorian age setting in which they are represented.
These photographs provide a number of cues through which one can look at them from different perspectives, going beyond the images and reaching the historic, political and cultural meanings they are an expression of. These interpreting mechanisms are automatically activated by a video sculpture representing a famous painting by Chardin in the lens of an early 20th-century camera placed on a Chippendale table. Another video sculpture, a flat screen placed between the wall and a mirror in an old Victorian frame, shows a fascinating image which appears and disappears, revealing our own reflection in the mirror.
Through these illusions we are urged to wonder whether dreams are still the product of our selves or the material product that we believe we have chosen but which has actually been imposed on us.