Beyond Savage

About

Matt Rowe's installation presents a Chroma Key vista where fragments of sublime landmass, sculptural assemblage and lens-based media are combined.

Rowe's representations of European Wildman are reframed within the aesthetic of simulated training scenarios, to symbolise our enduring desire to tame savagery.

The chroma blue painted surface throughout the exhibition represents a sterilised realm where the complexities of gothic imagery have the potential to unfold.The deep chroma blue draws parallels with folkloric accounts of domains beyond the limits of the civilised world.

Rowe's Wildmen are constructed from a variety of domestic materials on the brink of extinction. Harvested from the locality of Folkestone his costumes become decorative wearable landmasses.

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'Knight's work is like a feminine deconstruction of Francis Bacon' Dr Maria Walsh

'Knight's work is like an overripe baroque beauty' Alexis Harding

Knight investigates iconography and historical narratives within a contemporary practice, interjecting tradition with contemporary overtones by way of colour, compositions and forms.

Knight adapts painterly historical symbolism such as 'The Sacred Heart' into something more physically tangible, transforming the subject into objet d’art, suggestive of a precious relic or Faberge egg. Knight takes the imagery of these severed horrors of savagery and creates an object that is at once abject and desirable, presenting them with elements of humour and fragility.

Knight’s oil paintings reference historical landscape and portraiture. Portraying subjects such as The Madonna and Child as animated still life, frozen in an animalistic acrobatic limbo.

Within all Knights works a contradiction is communicated. Knight works primarily with figurative and object based imagery; aiming to express the aesthetics of desire, sex and death, descriptive as well as recalling the memory of the body.