Exhibition

Fiona Curran - Beach Fatigue

10 Oct 2013 – 23 Nov 2013

Event times

6pm

Cost of entry

Free

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Carslaw St Lukes

London, United Kingdom

Address

Travel Information

  • Bus: Number 55
  • Tube: Old Street (Exit 6) or Barbican
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FIONA CURRAN - BEACH FATIGUE

About

CARSLAW St* Lukes is pleased to announce Beach Fatigue, Fiona Curran's first solo exhibition in the gallery. ‘After all, if she knows that everything around her is unreal she'll cease to fear it… Now I know that only the artist can create an absolute reality' Goding in JG Ballard's The Screen Game, 1962 In ‘Waiting for the Perfect View' the assemblage of paintings, found objects, weathered carpets and Ostrich feather palm trees stand like some kind of postcard from the future. Everything natural has receded in this dystopic SF vision, artifice after a mass ecological extinction. Balanced between the old ideas of the end of the world and some kind of future hotch-potch imagination of what that once was the vignette appears as out of time as the rags and wreckage that Walter Benjamin has us believe to be the material of history in the making. This is the character of Beach Fatigue, Fiona Curran's malady of images. It's no coincidence that the black and white aerial photograph from which Curran sources the road lined with palm trees appears to be of military origin. The survey of bikini atoll before and after the nuclear tests comes to mind. Within it the strange linguistic accident of nuclear tests and the raciest of beach-wear come together in one ultramodern hit that marks the end of history, the end of convention, and potentially, at least, the end of everything. Such an entropic aggregate of meaning would no doubt have been at the heart of JG Ballard's fiction. Only the end would then come slowly creeping up like the Beach Fatigue that plagues the residents of his Vermillion Sands short stories, a pathology that corresponds to this affective entropy and dissipated energy of waiting for the inevitable tide to wash everything away into oblivion. Washed away unto a Pale Horizon perhaps - where we witness the plastic, artificial imaginary of a ‘natural' sunset and animated waves trapped in a mechanical delirium loop. Kit Hammonds, 2013

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