Dave Green Doppelganger

About

Dave Green's practice can perhaps be seen as an attempt to combine humour with the loftier discourses of art history and critical theory. His work engages the viewer by firstly disarming them through comic intervention but on closer inspection reveals more fundamental issues on the nature of art, representation and subjectivity. For his exhibition Doppelganger at Another Roadside Attraction Gallery he playfully examines the themes of duplicity, replication, identity and dislocation. Central to the exhibition is an aquarium containing two Ecuadorian hermit crabs. The hermit crab, a species with no shell of their own, are known to adopt abandoned shells of other creatures or discarded objects as protective outer amour. Emphasizing the artifice of its environment Green has made a synthetic shell that is a facsimile of the crab, prompting the grotesque notion that the creatures will adopt this crude model as its home. Both absurd and unsettling it addresses questions about the psychology of narcissism and the artifice of modern living. Green's photographic diptych ‘Fetch' depicts a dog chasing after a stick in an anonymous urban park. The horizontal line of the horizon is mirrored in the form of the stick the dog is chasing. A play is made on the archaic meaning of the word fetch as a ghostly double of a living person believed to be a warning of impending death. In ‘Wall Film' Green sets up a camera in front of a wall and waits for someone to approach him to ask why he is filming a wall. His response is usually minimal, allowing the passer by to project his own interpretation onto the situation. Emanating from the blank surface of the wall these projections of meaning become the content of the film. Dave Green is a recent graduate from Sheffield Hallam University and has exhibited in group shows at the End Gallery Sheffield, V22: The Wharf Road Project and had a recent solo exhibition at Supplement, London