Miles Aldridge. Please return Polaroid

About

This is the artist’s third solo exhibition at the gallery since 2009. Miles Aldridge’s Polaroids have been exhumed from their original context of preparatory sketches. Bearing hand-written notes, sharpie drawings, or chemical chimeras, Aldridge’s Polaroids are like ravaged stills from an erotic film noir. They are rife with intrigue, sex, impulse, and accident. Like in all of Aldridge’s work, each image presents a narrative that is cinematic yet abstract, dream-driven yet precise.

The exhibition celebrates the publication of a 204 page volume of Aldridge’s Polaroids, Miles Aldridge: Please return Polaroid, published by Steidl, with an essay by the prominent British novelist and writer Michael Bracewell. Bracewell writes: “Aldridge seems to turn Polaroid into summation as well as commentary – rather as though these discreet, keen, cold, intoxicating glimpses into a half-world between reality and cinema, romantic narrative and technical process, might do the work of intense short stories: the kind of stories in which atmosphere becomes action and gesture becomes character. Open-ended stories, driven by mystery and the relationship between glamour, poetry and violence – as understood by Raymond Chandler.” Aldridge will be in attendance at the opening reception and signed copies of the book will be available.

Miles Aldridge is famous for his surreal, hyper-chromatic world. Planet Aldridge is a luxury world just slightly beyond our own: hyper-sexualized, hyper-slick, ceremonial and full of dread. All is perfect, yet something is amiss; a bare-breasted blonde draped over lobster and caviar, a brunette skewered by a carousel, a school girl engulfed in too many teddy bears.