The Monstrous Femmes

About

 The exhibition will feature a new immersive environment that plays with light, shadow, and movement, as well as a range of lino prints and works on paper. Watson, a sound and performance artist grounded in her Irish Musical foundation provides the ambient and chilling audios infusion to AlTai's fantastical and abject yet hilarious visuals. The basis of the work is communicated through tapestries and references to feminist retellings of Celtic folklore.AlTai's and Watson's audio-visual environments combine ambient soundscapes and paintings, lino prints and tapestries. These works employ a cast of objects within a fantastical and psychologically charged environment that is at once vaguely familiar, evocative, and meditative.  Through a series of immersive installations, the viewer is taken into an escapist parallel reality.

Further into the space, the intensity builds. In an isolated room an installation of rotating wire mobiles that are illuminated by light animates the a surface of a paper screen to reveal a narrative which plays on tropes of a archaic and contemporary bacchanal celebration in a whimsical play of light and shadow. Finally, the exhibition concludes with 'The Monstrous Femme' tapestry installation and Watson's track 'Revival', alluding to the haunted attic and the parallels of silencing femmes and LGBTQ rage. The sound element, a “collaged” musical composition of found sounds, layered flute melodies and cello drones composed by Watson,  lends another dramatic dimension to the overall work. The result is “part fantasy, part dream, and entirely analog. It’s a workout of time or place.”