Preview: Friday 23 November 6.30-9pm
g39, Wyndham Arcade, Cardiff CF10 1FH UK
Exhibition open: 11-5.30 Wednesday to Saturday, 24 November –12 January 2008

Loners’ Island is the sixth and final exhibition in g39’s guest curator season, a continued commitment by g39 to highlight the best emerging artists and curators from Wales. The exhibition is the inaugural show by Mermaid and Monster, a new contemporary art agency that represents emerging and established artists from Wales and beyond.
This ‘island’ a place of melancholy, danger, wonderment and disinterested curiosity. It is full of discovery, boredom and potential pitfalls, an aesthetic and conceptual island where both spectator and creator is dragged between extremes of naiveté, mean-spirited sophistication, calculated ugliness, the sublime and the ridiculous.

Gordon Robin Brown makes satirical and surreal paintings which combine a curious mix of elegance, humour and eroticism. The works pose bizarre narrative scenes where both human and animal characters are set in private folkloric ensembles against vast expanses of colour. The large-scale acrylic paintings and small ink watercolours are drawn with a clarity of line and refined draughtsmanship. Brown works instinctively by responding to ideas as they suggest themselves, causing collisions between references as disparate as the world of Beatrix Potter and The Joy of Sex.

Lloyd Durling's delicate and minutely detailed biro drawings explore the way in which many artists are currently dealing with the meaning of landscape. The fantasy elements of his work, their magical extravagancies and gestural filigrees are juxtaposed with brutalised visions of humanity and environmental destruction. The complexity of these works offers a poised view of a world that is simultaneously perfected by technology and destroyed by modern warfare and industry.

David Marchant’s work embraces technology and also questions it. He uses simple, recognisable objects reworked using deadpan humour and visual gags to engage with complex issues. He also uses video and performance to question identity and challenge possible public oppression.

Known for his slick and slimy pictures of mutant creatures, Alex Gene Morrison lures his audience into a world of melting heads, rotten carcasses and giant flies. The idea of seduction and repulsion is very important to Morrison. His paintings, collages and animations brings the audience into a visceral experience and then keys into some of the base, yet very powerful human emotions such as desire, fear, disgust and wonder.

Dan Mort’s sculptural assemblages are surreal and slightly uncomfortable. Paying homage to the Dadaists, Mort’s otherwise commonplace objects are often thrown off balance by their arbitrary treatment. A wooden camel stands with one leg in a tin of dried paint, his neck curving up to the base of an anvil topped with a bonsai tree. A moto-cross bike is skewered on a roasting spit. This apparently cavalier approach to materials is belied by his careful consideration of form and balance.

Miranda Whall's self-portraits show the artist absorbed in autoerotic pleasures and the pragmatic monitoring of her fertile conditions, played out against arbitrary and seemingly indiscriminate groupings of images and objects such as birds, farm machinery and transport. Whall, often humorously, attempts to establish an equality between herself and her co-habitors or locality. She is interested in purposefully ignoring the boundaries that exist between her and other things and through doing so questions what it is to be female, and where this is appropriate and inappropriate.

If Loners’ Island has more than one resident, then surely it becomes a small community of likeminded souls with connections between the artist and audience. Not so on this desolate, rather disturbing isle, where each artist would rather die a honourable death or eat his or her young than become part of the general consensus. Each artist here stakes their own idiosyncratic claim on Loners’ Island, where their work can fight internal battles and say, This is this, this isn’t something else.

Text by Chris Brown


Loners' Island have invited the writer Leona Jones to write a metaphorical text to accompany the exhibition.
It will available as a free limited edition throughout the duration of Loners' island.
Edition of 400

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Press Release
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Flier
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