JAY CLOTH 'Beheaded'

About

Already well-known as the doorman at 'Duckie' nightclub and having worked extensively with David Hoyle (ex 'the Divine David') and Lea Anderson of the Cholmondeleys and the Featherstonehaughs, Jay Cloth is also an artist whose collages have begun to attract considerable attention. After including him in group shows over the last three years, studio1.1 is delighted to be presenting his first solo show. In work that presents itself as erotic, glamorous and tawdry all at once, Jay Cloth constructs collages that mix and mis-use images from on the one hand the glossiest and on the other the tackiest of printed sources. Top-drawer and top-shelf combine to form monstrous morphed figures, upending the Adman's dream into a consumerist nightmare. One day all this will be You. The artist as Jester and Judge, the Avenging Angel of Vogue magazine. His double-bluff identity on the door of 'Duckie' is itself a collage of disrupted signifiers, a wild mix from the novelty shop and the charity shop — a ‘Happy Families' not just hung, but well and truly drawn and quartered. Creating this role he isn't inventing an alter ego or a disguise, but rather an alternative view of identity, a self in perpetual transit. And absolutely at one with his public persona the work he creates presents a distorting (and deeply moral) mirror to the eager viewer. Like the barker of a Dickensian freakshow, Jay Cloth's work introduces the audience to a self it might have wished had stayed hidden in the attic.