All the Dead Dears catalogue by WW Contemporary Art

All the Dead Dears

Emma Talbot, People are Ghosts and Ghosts are People (detail ) Front Cover: Sarah Gillham, The Spinner (detail)

ALL THE DEAD DEARS 14 Nov - 15 Dec 2012

Ross Chisholm Sarah Gillham Mindy Lee Emma Talbot Sarah Woodfine

WWGallery| All The Dead Dears

Press Release | 3 The Monsters of Horror | 4 The work | 6 Biographies | 28

‘Riddled with ghosts, to lie Deadlocked with them, taking roots as cradles rock.’ (All the Dead Dears, Sylvia Plath)

WWGallery| All The Dead Dears

Press release WW Gallery is pleased to present All the Dead Dears, an exhibition of drawing, painting, sculpture and print by Ross Chisholm, Sarah Gillham, Mindy Lee, Emma Talbot & Sarah Woodfine. Curated by Mindy Lee and Sarah Gillham, All the Dead Dears is the first in a new programme of exhibitions guest-curated by prominent artist/curator duos, which will continue throughout 2013 at WW Gallery. A sinister lure lurks within All the Dead Dears reviving what once was into an otherworldly state. Sensual desire is twisted and broken open. This disrupted decadence tips in and out of loss, emptiness and longing. Each artist references and retells the past, drawing from personal memories, rituals, invented mythologies and historical icons. As these moments are aroused, an ‘out of time’ uneasy tension sets in. Time is spliced together compressing different moments into hybrid narratives, which fuse and cyclically loop. These narratives are trapped in various fluxes of evolving, unravelling, pulling apart, lacerating, breaking or dissolving. As tension mounts there’s a sense that things are getting out of control. Mundane or accidental moments take on increasing significance and theatricality. Public and private persona’s interchange and expose a psychological release, which is consumed and reabsorbed. An opulence of surface and subject tempts the viewer into All the Dead Dears. Beautiful seduction and desires in turn unveil awkwardness, violence, horror and the macabre. Trapped between attraction and repulsion, in a compressed present, the viewer is horribly ompelled to indulge.

Ross Chisholm appears courtesy of IBID Projects, Sarah Woodfine appears courtesy of Danielle Arnaud. Exhibition curated by Sarah Gillham & Mindy Lee

The Monsters of Horror

Horror revolves around nightmares and hidden fears. The fear of the unknown, the fear of the hidden-self, and the fear of the ‘Other’ are all powerful forces that tug at the subconscious, and serve to undermine and unsettle our sense of a unified self. Horror is based on the concept of the abject – that which is ambiguous, categorically interstitial, and therefore abhorrent – and the dialectical mechanism of attraction/ repulsion. It is built on the repression of deep-rooted fantasies and desires, which simmer away beneath the artfully constructed surface of the self. Because conscious recognition of these desires is too traumatic for the subject, they become repressed, and in the darker recesses of the subconscious give birth to monsters. Here there is a conflict, whereby the representation of an underlying wish or desire that is not permitted in its naked form becomes infected by its inhibition and turns rancid. Simultaneously attractive and repulsive, it employs the imagery of horror in the pursuit of an outlet whereby the subject will not be unduly judged or punished for indulgence in their visions, which, precisely because they are horrific, are assumed to beset them and be situated beyond their control. It is for this reason that the fears evoked in horror are frequently manifested in a psychosexual register, and on the occasion when these fears erupt outward, they turn malignant and assume the appearance of something deformed and impure. When viewed from a psychoanalytic perspective, the monsters of horror can be regarded as wish fulfilment figures. It is not in spite of the feeling of repulsion that they instil in us, but precisely because

WWGallery| All The Dead Dears

of it, that we are attracted to their capacity to transgress. Through this mechanism, the monster becomes an externalisation of our own internal, unacknowledged wish, which the structure of repression cloaks in horrific and repulsive imagery, before ultimately revealing it to us and issuing it forth unto the world. The same thing that appeared on initial inspection to be displeasure, is revealed under closer scrutiny to be the conduit to pleasure itself… only it has assumed a retch-inducing disguise. The monster serves as a projection, a twisted reification, of the subject’s base desires, brought into existence to annunciate and give warped form to their underlying wish. The monsters of horror provide an abject intrusion – an unnatural interruption – into the real. We find them threatening because they are categorically interstitial: hybrids that transgress categorical distinctions and derive infernal combinations from that which is supposed to be held discrete, an infringement of the metaphysics of their mise-enscène. At the heart of their constitution monsters are a breach of the ontological foundations of our world, an expression of the deeply held, but commonly suppressed, ambivalence that underlies the postmodern condition. By Jack Stokoe The above is an excerpt from ‘‘The Network of Want and the Event Horizon of Horror’”Jack Stokoe is an artist and writer, he recently had a solo show, Three Essays on Sexuality, at Furnished Space, London.

Sarah Woodfine, Jehanne 2012, pencil on paper in glass dome, perspex base, height 30, dia. 16