Catalogue | Jamie Dyson

About

Exhibition runs: 10 – 18th January 2015 (11/12th and 17/18th)

The multiple re-enactments, and near infinitely retold versions of this particular creation story of modern America; from its inauspicious beginnings in Scrooby, Nottinghamshire, to the their passage from Plymouth, England to Massachusetts, (via Leiden, Holland) on the East coast of America in 1620, are used as the springboard for a visual investigation.

The Exhibition includes Drawing, Photography and video, and the works are representations of the above travelers articulated as idiosyncratic hand-drawn caricatures, which bind these real-life figures into a reality other than ours, and are depicted as magical or supernatural.

The work also utilizes the themes and ideas that encompass the subject of the Aura, both spiritual and scientific, from righteousness to natural phenomena. The reification of these historical figures outside of their original contexts, often held within consumerist paradigms, are what prompted the beginning of this project.

Dyson sees the outputs of all of the instances reported above as important and interlinked when dealing with a complex and fraught telling of any particular history. The idea that these groups of people are simplified to mere charms for individual, religious and corporate self preservation is an affront to didactics and to the memory of an event which is infinitely more complex than that of a mascot bringing charm to a thing, moment or occasion.