Olivier Millagou - Muster to Custer or Else

About

The exhibition welcomes you into a monochrome world. White ‘covers’ all of the ground floor of the gallery. On the white walls, postcards depicting beachfront landscapes, framed in white, are totally covered in Tippex. White electric wires trail across the floor and fall down through a staircase leading to the lower ground floor.

Here the walls become black. Dim lighting seeps from the electric wires as if this ‘underground world’, evocative of a squat, takes its energy from the white clean universe above. A symbiotic relationship is created, utopian purity highlighted by the oppositional, yet dependent, parasitic world below.

Framed in black is a further series of postcards depicting beachfronts, this time in colour. However, a mesh of chicken wire painted over the glass contradicts the image of paradise shown on the cards, and exposes it as being perpetually out of reach. Bikers’ T-shirts are hung on the walls like posters, stretched and deformed suggesting the opulence of their previous owners. Bikers’ leather jackets, using the Hell’s Angels’ colours, are hung on the wall like flags. The lower ground floor is separated into two rooms by a chicken wire wall, behind which there is a stage set for a concert.