Vegas Gallery
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Yee Haw!
dal 21/3/2007 al 21/4/2007
Thursday-Sunday 12.00-18.00

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21/3/2007

Yee Haw!

Vegas Gallery, London

Group show. This exhibition examines how these images and ideas about the American West are assimilated, revised and represented in the works of a number of contemporary artists, most of whom are not American. Curated by Ken Pratt.


comunicato stampa

Group show

Curated by Ken Pratt

“Oh, give me land, lots of land under starry skies above,
Don't fence me in.
Let me ride through the wide open country that I love,
Don't fence me in.”

The dominance of the American media machine since the mid-twentieth century has ensured that the images and notions of “the Wild West”, already gaining a wide popular visibility by the late nineteenth century, have become a global cultural language. Through the media and popular iconography, those of us who have never even set foot on American soil already have expectations about “the West”; what it looks like, feels like and what stories unfold in these familiar landscapes.

Vegas Gallery is pleased to present “Yee Haw!” This show examines how these images and ideas about the American West are assimilated, revised and represented in the works of a number of contemporary artists, most of whom are not American.

The collaborations of Eric Wright and Cathy Ward engage with notions and images of the American West as much as their individual bodies of work spanning almost two decades. American Eric and British Cathy met on the acclaimed international residency programme at The Banff Centre, Alberta, Canada. Their shared interests meant that they have continued to produce bodies of work –individually and together- in a range of media that have touched on the topic in numerous ways. In most cases their work dealing with the American West is not an isolated topic but, instead an expression of their broader interest in the visual languages of folklore and popular cultural iconography that they have traced through a range of cultures. It stands alongside a series dealing with traditional English rural culture and a body of work dealing with German folk forms amongst others.

Perhaps the name, “Transromantik” under which a number of these projects were authored is the strongest clue. The concern with much of their work, whether dealing with German folklore, or whether – as in “Yee Haw!”- addressing ideas about the American West, is concerned with the tradition of Romanticism that runs through the various cultural contexts they examine. Perhaps, more accurately, they are preoccupied with how grand romantic ideas are transformed and inevitably thwarted in their translation into popular visual languages, the lofty aspirations coexisting within a layer of kitsch.

Works drawn from “Destiny Manifest” and other series of work dealing with the West demonstrate Ward and Wright’s penchant for materials and forms that refer to the populist renditions of these iconic tales lapsing into the kitsch. “The Salt Bride” presents a nineteenth century bridal bonnet crystallized in salt and presented in the style of a drawing room curiosity in ironic opposition to the grim realities of its inspirational source. Other works, such as paintings on wood or landscapes that become sculptural through painting them onto stuffed three-dimensional canvases highlight the appropriation of much darker histories by cuddly populist culture; the dark realities of the real histories of the West offered up as a souvenir.

The notion of the lost paradise or Utopia that fails to deliver is a rich seam in the narratives we have come to know about the American West. Cathy Ward and Eric Wright tackle these directly, such as in the “Destiny Manifest” body of work that concerns itself with a true story of a wagon train of nineteenth century pioneers duped into pursuing their dreams by racketeers and finding only hardship, hunger, death and cannibalism. The work, realized in a range of media from sculpture and painting to film and photography concerns itself as much with the illustrative media languages that we expect to be deployed in recounting such tales as it does with the simultaneously macabre and romantic content of the story.

The use of such visual languages is also at the heart of a body of painting works by Eric Wright in which the art historic languages of European portraiture are appropriated into portraits of Country and Western stars. Here, the blurring of the private and public in personal stories of hardship and heartbreak –an essential ingredient for any real country star- is reworked into a kind of heraldic language more usually associated with the depiction of European nobility.

By contrast, Cathy Ward’s series of documentary photographs of wax works dummies show us images that are very much about the West telling itself stories about its own past and alleged history. Photographed in various American ghost town wax works during their extensive road trips across the USA, the immediately obvious artificiality of the dummies only serves to raise questions about the histories of the West they act out in staged tableaux. The folklore is immediate and very real, instantly recognizable to any of us from a deluge of media versions. So strong is the similarity between these forlorn tableaux and the film depictions that we are drawn to ask about the relative depth of self-awareness in what stands for a historical past.

Together they have shown work in a number of international and prestigious venues including P.S.1 MoMa, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Talahasse; Mercer Union, Toronto; MAMA, Rotterdam; Café Gallery Projects, London and the University of Hawaii Art Gallery, Oahu. Cathy Ward has show solo work at The Jerwood Gallery, London; Kunsthalle Basel, Basel; The New Gallery, Walsall, MKG: The Milton Keynes Gallery, Milton Keynes; The Walker Art Centre, Liverpool; The Drawing Centre, New York and the 1995 Venice Biennale. Eric Wright has shown solo work at City Racing, London; Stephen Friedman Gallery, London; Limner Gallery, New York and Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris.

The German photographer Uta Kögelsberger’s work often deals with the landscape filmed under manipulated conditions rather than manipulated photography; long exposure night photography or photography in which unexpected light sources are introduced into the landscape itself. In so doing, Kögelsberger has produced a body of work in which mood or emotive content is often heightened or altered. Her work begs us to question the representation of landscapes and the staged nature of images of the apparently natural world.

In a recent series of work made during a residency in the USA, Kögelsberger applied a number of her structured approaches to the desert landscapes of California. The impetus for the work came out of wanting to explore how photography has actually shaped the notions that we have of the West; how the lens has literally contributed to what our eyes expect to see when looking for “the West”. Whilst the results are far from cold and academic, there is nonetheless an art historical perspective within her trope as she seeks to explore the relationships between photography and the staging of landscapes that have come, over time, to be heavily culturally loaded.

In some of these series, the approach is almost documentary: a coincidental decoration of the quintessentially American big rig truck in front of a real mountain ridge highlights the relationships between the apparently natural landscape and its depictions.

In others –such as the “Getting Lost” series- she attempted to metaphorically get lost at night in the desert and then photographed the landscape illuminated by distress flares shot into the sky. The effect in the images, as with earlier works, is to introduce a strong emotive element. Often the feeling is one of an eerie power seemingly inherent in nature itself, coming from the earth or the sky, the artificial introduction of the flares assuming the quality of inexplicable natural phenomena or some supernatural force. The result is that she has produced images through a process that itself references that narratives that we know about the West: lost in the desert we see this strange world through the eyes of the first uncertain alien interlopers to this new and challenging, even threatening, if beautiful world.

Uta Kögelsberger has had solo shows at a range of respected venues including Berwick Gymnasium, Berwick-Upon-Tweed; Café Gallery Projects, London and the Glassell Project Space; associate of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. She has contributed to many group projects in spaces that include Laurence Miller Gallery, New York; Richard Demarco Foundation, Edinburgh; and ArtFutures 2005/Bloomberg Space. She will contribute to the upcoming Arles Photo Festival.

The Canadian artist, Dallas Seitz, might be said to be something of a real cowboy, having grown up on a ranch in rural Canada. His practice as an artist, though largely conceptual, often makes direct or oblique references to the environment in which he lived and in which his family still lives.

Working in media ranging from drawing and video to glass and installations of found materials and objects, his work frequently deals with a hidden brutal layer of experience nestling beside the comfortable, the domestic and familiar. Collections and collecting behaviour often form a key part of his practice in which he acquires, makes or arranges the objects that come to stand for someone of something, a practice that naturally segues into his additional work as a curator. Whether it is the secret drug dependencies of affluent teenagers sublimated into beautiful glass ornaments or the genuinely disturbing facets of his grandmother’s doll collection, he constructs discourses in which the evident and the obvious often give way to the disturbing and the brutal.

Perhaps one of his best-known works –for fairly self-evident reasons- gives a prime example of the kinds of discourses he constructs about the environment from which he sprung. In a video work showing his father killing a coyote, Seitz’s dispassionate view of a fairly familiar and everyday experience on a working ranch only heightens the sense of horror and queasiness as the animal’s life is ended by a mechanical action. There is the same sense of grizzly reality underlying his carving in caribou horn of a coyote’s head; death of one form or another is subsumed into a folkloric decorative tradition.

By contrast, other works such as ink drawings or installations of found materials speak of a kind of empathy for the lonely outpost desire to find or make the beautiful and decorative in a world of tough, isolated survival. His intricate, partly abstracted drawings or installations of kitschy objects referencing western popular decorative forms certainly draw attention to the disparity between the tough image of the rancher and the flowery nature of local decorative traditions. But, perhaps they also speak something of an explanation; the need to find the pretty in a terrain where one’s hands might often be covered in blood.

In the modular installation constructed for “Yee Haw” the strands of his practice are formulated into a single table-like structure referencing both museological presentations and underscoring the way in which he uses precise groups of objects loaded with meaning to create a unified impact.

Dallas Seitz has shown in a range of international venues including West Germany, Berlin; Cell Project Space, London; Gazonrouge, Athens; Temporary Contemporary, London and The Banff Centre, Alberta.

Like Dallas Seitz, Michael Petry works as both a curator and an artist. Like Seitz, he might also be seen as a real cowboy. Perhaps not surprisingly, Petry – who hails from El Paso, Texas- sometimes produces works that highlight the crossovers between conceptual art and curatorial practices. As an artist, however, he is primarily known for his works that address identity, sexuality and sexual politics.

In some cases he has used confrontational and direct imagery, in others a pared down conceptual visual language of installation and simplified form in which a personal coded language –such as beads standing for ejaculate or knots in rope standing for orgasms- replaces the overtly sexual image. The strand running between the two is that an overt gay sexuality of one form or another is often present. Petry’s discussion of sexual political identity and his Texan background may not always be intentionally linked in the way that makes works, but it is certainly valid to see this layer as self-aware. After all, the visual codes of popular gay culture were understandably eager to appropriate the idea of the cowboy into an erotic currency.

In works such as “Rough Neck”, the name and the materials can easily be seen as references to cowboy culture or Midnight Cowboy culture; the rope readily standing for the iconic lasso of the working ranch hand or the bondage toys of gay sexual culture. This work, that intentionally references erotic asphyxiation, resonates on other levels, bringing to mind the lynching scenes of popular westerns that, of course, is a circular notion since they are often the idea seed in the viewer for the very sexual practices to which the piece refers.

Another work “Low Hangers”, an installation that suspends blown glass globes just above the floor, refers more directly to male genitalia. Visually the materials are smooth, attractive and fragile. The name of the piece conjures up the swaggering male culture of the West to which Petry’s work refers, charring with a branding iron the point at which optimum buckaroo machismo becomes the ultimate gay fantasy or identity.

Michael Petry has had solo shows at a range of international venues including Sandaram Tagore Gallery, New York; Rice University Art Gallery, Houston and Hå gamle prestegard, Vigre, Norway. He has contributed to work to numerous group exhibitions, including projects at The New Art Gallery, Walsall; The South London Gallery, London; ArtOMI, Hudson, New York; Rogaland Kunstmuseum, Stavanger and Kettles Yard, Cambridge. He showed in the 1991 Venice Biennale, as well as Ornamenta, and the Duren Biennales.

“Stadt des Lichts” is described as a “no budget, sci-fi western filmed in Berlin”. This 60 minute quasi-narrative film by Mario Mentrup and Volker Sattel is as fascinating for its production process as it is for its content. Produced on very little money, the filmmakers managed to call in favours, persuade friends and generally harangue the cool kids of Berlin’s electropop scene to help them realize their vision.

The result is that we get to see Peaches making her debut as Billy the Willie, a dubious sheriff whilst the rest of the cast includes the likes of Bennet Togler and Angie Reed to name but two, with a soundtrack by Patrick Catani. The film’s fascination with the form of the Western is reminiscent of the work of German neue welle filmmakers of the 1970s. There is also a strong, oblique sense of Wim Wender’s fascination with the American West. In turn, this earlier cinematic fascination with the frontier land of America was itself the follow-up to an almost obsessive interest in the evolving mythology of America that gripped Weimar Germany. Perhaps best known through the works of Brecht and Weil, the urban jungles of the New World were a powerful setting for the work of numerous heavyweight Weimar creatives. For them, as in this film, the setting of the American West is actually an allegorical statement about the self; ‘City of lights’ as the title suggests, is entirely about Berlin, despite the cowboys and showgirls. Urban collapse and social injustice, a strident focus of Weimar works, reappear here.
Mario Mentrup is primarily known as an actor in Berlin where he lives and works with numerous acting credits in German film and television as well as in acclaimed theatre venues such as the Hebbel am Ufer, Berlin and the Thalia, Hamburg. An active member of various art and performance scenes in Berlin, he was involved with experimental projects with Anshelm Franke during his time at Kunst Werke, Berlin.
He has developed numerous cross-disciplinary projects, including many with the wave of Berlin musicians gaining international recognition in the last decade. A musician himself, he is an instrumentalist for the German pop group, Soffy O.
Volker Sattel has worked in the commercial film and television industry for many years with skills as a cinematographer as well as those of a contributing artist.
“Stadt de Lichts” was the first extended film collaboration and has been shown in numerous festivals and theatre and screening venues in Germany and was included in the “Ipod Killed the Videostar” project at MAMA, Rotterdam. Their new work, “I Do Adore” will be included as a special installation version in the “Double A-side” project at ARTIS, the Centre for Fine Art and ‘s Hertogenbosch Stedelijk Museum later this year.

Mario Mentrup's film: Stadt des Lichts –City Of Light
The film will be shown during the exhibition

“Stadt des Lichts” is described as a “no budget, sci-fi western filmed in Berlin”. This 60 minute quasi-narrative film by Mario Mentrup and Volker Sattel is as fascinating for its production process as it is for its content. Produced on very little money, the filmmakers managed to call in favours, persuade friends and generally harangue the cool kids of Berlin’s electropop scene to help them realize their vision.

The result is that we get to see Peaches making her debut as Billy the Willie, a dubious sheriff whilst the rest of the cast includes the likes of Bennet Togler and Angie Reed to name but two, with a soundtrack by Patrick Catani.

“Stadt de Lichts” was the first extended film collaboration and has been shown in numerous festivals and theatre and screening venues in Germany and was included in the “Ipod Killed the Videostar” project at MAMA, Rotterdam. Their new work, “I Do Adore” will be included as a special installation version
in the “Double A-side” project at ARTIS, the Centre for Fine Art and 's Hertogenbosch Stedelijk Museum later this year.

Image: Cathy Ward & Eric Wright

Private View: Thursday 22 March 18.00 - 21.00

Vegas Gallery
64-66 Redchurch Street - London
Open: Thursday-Sunday 12-18
Free admission

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