No More Icons

About

Gabriele Beveridge, Giles Round, Jacob Farrell & Matthew Darbyshire, Peles Empire, Rowena Harris Blackfriars Hoarding, 5th April - 27th June 2012 Gone are the days of icons. Once religious objects housed in churches, now icons are people who we celebrate in magazines and on screens. Anyone can be an icon just as long as they are accessible. They have to really mean something. Yet the closest we usually get to icons is in two-dimensional form: flattened, stylized and reproduced, these images become iconic through looking a certain way. The icon is no longer extraordinary. Being iconic is just a style. Rod Barton Gallery is pleased to present No More Icons, an exhibition of recent sculpture and installation at Blackfriars Hoarding. Located underneath Blackfriars Bridge, the space - only viewable through a series of windows - provides a particular type of encounter. Participating artists will each use a window to exhibit newly commissioned work, as the window gallery is revised in relation to the contemporary icon. Mainly experienced through media imagery, the icon is a figure who appears to be tangible but is ultimately out of reach. Here conflicting conditions of visibility and inaccessibility reassess the complexities of display as defined by representation and encounter. Space appears compressed whilst works are presented in the consideration that they will only be seen from the front. Regarding the adoration of the icon, physical distance is maintained. However each employing different mechanisms, individual works expose the divide between surface and representation, highlighting the differences between how something is portrayed and what it actually is. Exploring what it is to be iconic, recognisable objects are either included or reproduced as the manipulation of image-making is revealed. - Carly McGoldrick