Tristan Pigott | Slippery Gaze

About

London-based, multi-media artist Pigott is celebrated for his knowing and wry critique of contemporary culture and an ongoing exploration into the place of the image and image-making methods in today’s visually saturated landscape. Pigott’s first solo show at the gallery will feature a new body of work spanning painting, sculpture and installation which highlight the way content consumption has now reached a new crescendo intended to ‘trap’ the viewer.

Pigott’s fascination with our straddled position between the real and the virtual has it’s roots in Lucretius’s poem De rerum natura (On the Nature of Things), which acts as a foundation for this new body of work. The poem speaks of an imagined materialism of infinite individual atoms; falling, swerving and colliding in a boundless void, yet somehow remaining intrinsically connected. Referencing vertical perspective, GPS, Google Maps, drones and satellites, Pigott seeks to make us aware of the invisible space the gaze now must traverse to reach its point of focus.

Starting points for the works include Brexit and Scallop Wars - where a mythical snake is seen eating martini glasses and scallops, resulting in it shitting out pearls that seem to bounce over a ‘carry on’ -esque snippet from a Bruegel
painting. Margaret Thatcher’s famous covering of a BA model plane’s new tail-fin designs for lack of British national identity are referenced in the covering of a gin trap (traditionally used for hunting game) with a printed semi-transparent fabric.

Contemporary and historic events are intertwined with references to painters like Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Richard Dadd and Bronzino: “Loosely I wanted to create a sense that all images on all matter, human included, are able to slip off, disintegrate and be recast, whether metaphorically or literally” says the artist.