JAKOB KOLDING – MASQUERADES

Posted on 2014-11-24

Taking masquerades as a starting point, the works playfully combine a wide range of influences. From renaissance sculptures to surrealism, psychoanalysis and dream interpretation to modernist theatre, dioramas and classic literature to hip hop culture and pop music, post-structuralist identity theory and back again to pre-modern myths and fables. In the process, a world of constantly shifting, changing and overlapping positions is constructed.

Often using only a few elements–in some works just one or two–a wide range of possible meanings are opened up. What at first hand might look like a symbol with a certain significance gradually turns to suggest multiple readings, oscillating between different positions and seeming contradictions, creating an ambivalent state of radical openness that is, at the same time, liberating as well as frightening–a state of existential drama that is loaded with a dream-like ambiguity.

Central to the exhibition is a large installation composed of individual sculptures of life-sized figures made from prints on wood cutouts. A landscape of people, trees and animals create a scenography that lies somewhere in between theatre scene design, 19th century dioramas and amusement parks. As the spectator walks among the figures, the basic stage prop construction becomes obvious. It’s a scene that can be entered, but which at the same time shows its own one-sidedness. It invites the spectator to become a part of it, while simultaneously introducing considerations on its very construction, making evident the slippery slope between the real and the imaginary. Or indeed, between the “real” and the performed.

Opposite – The Raven, 2014

Exhibition runs through to January 10th, 2015

Galerie Martin Janda
Eschenbachgasse 11
A-1010 Vienna
Austria

www.martinjanda.at

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JONATHAN MONK – I ♥ 1984

Posted on 2014-11-24

Jonathan Monk revisits narratives drawn from his own biography and transforms historical works by artists that have also proved to be personal, formative influences. A new wall-hung assemblage of stitched-together souvenir tea towels, entitled My Life Within the Lives of Others II (2014), marks every year and indeed every day since his birth so far, with 46 anachronistic cloth calendars showing different species of Australian birds, Swiss chalet exteriors and other kitsch scenes. Fragments of his parents’ 1970s curtain material are rendered in photographic works that return them to framed, window-like settings, despite the fabrics clearly being discarded as drop cloths for subsequent domestic re-decoration.

Among the moving portraits of Monk’s family is a slideshow that magnifies one image of them 80 times over, through which the artist is reflected in his child’s gaze – as titled, Monk is literally Searching for My Father in My Sister’s Eyes (2002) – while a series of childhood or holiday snaps, Same Time In A Different Place, are each juxtaposed with a vintage invitation card, for shows by the likes of Dan Graham, Sol LeWitt or On Kawara, sourced from the same date.

Opposite – Senza Titolo V, 2012

Exhibition runs through to January 17th, 2015

Lisson Gallery
27 Bell Street
NW1 5DA
London

www.lissongallery.com

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