Exhibition
LOVE IS AN OCULAR SICKNESS - Centre for Contemporary Arts (Glasgow)
Joint exhibition of work from London based artists Caroline Walker and Lydia Corry.
PRIVATE VIEW 2nd December 6-9pm
ARTIST TALK 4th December 3pm
“Love is an ocular sickness” is a statement taken from Plato’s writing on love in which he discusses vision in terms of a physical exchange where the eyes are literally pierced by the object they perceive. Walker’s paintings and Corry’s installations develop a series of dialogues exploring constructions of femininity in which images are actively engaged in a subjective ambush. Both artists are involved in a process of re-appropriation or repetition. Corry draws on imagery from popular culture, embedding this material back into her own symbolic language of repeated motifs which scrutinize the role of semantics as an active force in creating social patterns and perceptual realities. Walker’s paintings are located in a space between reality and fiction exploring constructed narratives developed through collaboration with life models at different locations or ‘sets’. A sense of artifice and illusion is expressed in both the actions and dress of the figure as well as the architecture she inhabits, highlighting the fictive space of painting itself.
This element of repetition in Corry and Walker’s work exposes the recurring feminine gesture common to both the fashion magazine and the female subject of western painting history. For both artists what is at stake is an exploration of female imagery as a site onto which culturally prescribed subjectivities are projected: flanked with notions of fact and fiction. The represented female is considered as template, never portraiture, but instead the staging of the body is an idea or experiment. Ideas of exterior/interior (public and private) space are crucial. Corry references the public image of women which relies on air-brushing, artifice and disguise. Walker explores a private female subject, in which the staged banalities of domestic life are preformed like the poster girl poses of a glossy magazine. Interplay between different approaches to image making considers this show as a space of fantasy where subjective psychological constructions are conceived, received and translated.
Lydia Corry and Caroline Walker both studied at Glasgow School of Art and the Royal College of Art and now live and work in London. Walker has been previously selected for the John Moores (2006), Jerwood Contemporary Painters (2008), and was recently shortlisted for the 2010 Threadneedle Prize. She has exhibited widely across the UK and abroad, most recently a solo show at Marlborough Fine Art in London and a solo show at Ivan Gallery, Bucharest. Corry’s recent exhibitions include ‘Pattern Making’ at GFL and ‘Bold Tendencies III’ at Hannah Barry Project Space, both London. She has a forthcoming solo exhibition at Stamford Works in London.
www.lydiacorry.com
www.clwart.co.uk
