Exhibition
Frou-Frou Foxes in Midsummer Fires
30 Jun 2007 – 29 Jul 2007
Event times
By appointment only
Cost of entry
Free
Address
- 85 Spencer Street
- Birmingham
- B18 6DE
- United Kingdom
About
Frou-Frou Foxes in Midsummer FiresJonathan Baldock, Emma Barrow, Mona Casey, Gavin Murphy, Paul McAree, Tom Ranahan, John Timberlake
COLONY presents Frou-Frou Foxes in Midsummer Fires, a show revelling in summer madness and folly. Presenting a disparate collection of works, with no apparent unifying themes or grand principals, subjects include landscape, flies, dicks, bunkers, astronomy, penguins and more
While at first the work may seem frivolous and light, each work contains layers which suggest an altogether more complex web of meaning and interpretation. A disparate collection of work is drawn together by the very sense of investigation each artist employs, tugging at the viewer to move beyond the immediate.
Jonathan Baldock's visceral paintings toy with celebrity, art history, the ugly and ideas of beauty. Emma Barrow's sculptural works question the means of their existence as art objects via the process of their making and destruction. Mona Casey's digital images manipulate and appropriate images taken from art history and the media. Greg Cox juxtaposes very different materials such as formica and cardboard to create thought provoking yet playful considerations on modernism and pop culture. Tom Ranahan's large scale photographs look at architectural interventions on the margins of landscape, from playgrounds to bunker defences on French beaches.
Paul McAree's paintings look at the nature of meaning via a troubled Irish history, a Sunday school painting style giving way to source material loaded with meaning. John Timberlake's Russian Painting No 3 is based on the rhetoric of 1950s-60s astronomical illustration. Through the removal of key elements within the accompanying Russian text we are denied access to both the language and its meaning. Gavin Murphy's Sketches for a Light/Heavy Monument series questions the gravitas of Time and its passing to the everyday observation of people on the street.