Modern women cry modern women don't cry

“I hope that the adult visiting the exhibition is made to feel uneasy, reduced to a feeling like an abandoned child. ” Karen Koltrane.

The new show at Another Roadside Attraction is both fascinating and disturbing which should please artist Karen Koltrane a great deal. Karen has had solo shows in Soho 19 (New York), Flame Gallery (New York), Musterberg Gallery (San Francisco), and took part in a group exhibition in Berlin at Kunstklu. In this, her first solo show in London, the darkened gallery with its installation seems to hover between a horror movie set and a child’s nightmare. Amongst the Christmas trees and the miniature garden shed, there are two screens showing something related to bodily fluid that could make even the strongest-stomached viewers a little queasy.

Richard Adamson, Director of Another Roadside Attraction Gallery explained why he was excited to show Karen’s work. “I met Karen while working for the Hammer Sidi Gallery several years ago. Lotta Hammer was in the process of organising an exhibition around the subject the re-contextualization of Folk Art in contemporary art. There was a menace to Karen’s work that interested me, an indefinable quality that used the language of B movies, fairytales and horror to examine anxiety, identity and the mythology of biography. Her work has a literary quality that reminds me of some of my favourite writers, Angela Carter, Gunter Grass and Gabriel García Márquez.

When we approached her to do a show she was very keen to transform the space into something more than four walls to display art and felt the complex at night had an eerie quality that she wanted to extend into the exhibition. We worked with her in sourcing Christmas trees and a shed to create an installation that is part Santa's grotto and part horror cinema’s shed in the woods- symbolic perhaps of our fear of solitude and death.”

Karen’s motivation for her work is enlightening, but perhaps not entirely reassuring:

“Where is it that children go? What is it they see that we (adults) do not? Children frighten themselves, they seek out and soak up new feelings and emotions - in the context of being raised by adults, this is their blessing, and curse. Children are able to freely think about life and are therefore closer to death - it is not until we, adults, are on our deathbeds that we are free to experience this once more. That is, if you are lucky enough to have a deathbed on your last days. The space has been set up for viewers to explore as though on an abandoned film set - the film set is both real, and unreal depending on what feedback you are listening to at the time. It is my hope that the adult visiting the exhibition is made to feel uneasy, reduced to a feeling like an abandoned child - the only anchor being the installation before them - an environment for uneasy play that they know they are unable to play in ,being an adult, conforming and acting as expected. ”

The work incorporates and contemporises folktales - a process that fascinates Karen: “Modern thought is never very far away from folk tales: Hansel and Gretel was written about a time when life had many hardships such as famine, war, plague; therefore abandoning children in the woods to die or fend for themselves was not unknown. It was my intention for the exhibition to be a thought provoking fable for middle-class consumer adults of the 21st Century. Hansel and Gretel likely stemmed from historical instances of abandonment caused by famine, however, now there is a new famine. We are still abandoning our children in the same way we always have - these children grow up to become adults, that adult is you. Girls starve unhappily, boys disconnect and grow numb.

Karen is also exploring rituals, of Christmas and Halloween, rediscovering her own capacity to create rituals and reconsidering societies’ relationship with its own.

“Having deliberately avoided the Christmas period this year in favour of a cabin deep in the Finnish woods I began to form my own rituals, these were small and meaningless to anyone else but myself. Surrounded by nature I could play in the way a child plays, collecting sticks to form strange typefaces, climbing tress with a video camera, and filming an unaware deer below. Society seems to be sleepwalking through its rituals and it is having a serious negative effect on us. The rituals have been hijacked by marketeers and corporate sponsorship. We do what we think we should do, we act in false unhappy ways, we are not connected with our friends and family in a healthy positive uninhibited way. I think that the setting up of this exhibition was an unconscious idea of what Christmas could be.”

This is certainly a whole new Christmas experience, but perhaps not for the faint-hearted!