They Had Four Years 2009
They Had Four Years 2009
Lauren Gault, Iain Sommerville & Kevin Harman
9th May - 7th June 2009
Location: GENERATORprojects
Generator Projects presents 'They Had Four Years', the gallery's annual exhibition of new work from a selection of recent graduates. This year for the first time we have chosen open up the remit to include a shortlist from all four of Scotland’s art schools.
Of this shortlist we have decided to exhibit three of the candidates; Iain Sommerville and Lauren Gault (both Duncan of Jordanstone graduates) and Kevin Harman from Edinburgh College of Art.
Iain Sommerville
Sommerville’s work is preoccupied with the carnivalesque imagery of past cultures, particularly that of medieval/Renaissance Europe, which compliment a number of his thematic leanings. These include subjects regarding punishment and humility with relation to gender and entertainment.
The rituals and motifs of past European cultures provide a broad range of aesthetic possibilities with which themes regarding the darker aspects of punishment, entertainment and gender are addressed.
Lauren Gault
Gault’s practice has long been governed by a preoccupation with the realm beyond instinct. Utilizing Rene Girard’s philosophical writings on the notion of ‘mimetic desire’, Gault selects and manipulates recurring themes and imagery from a vast area of research spanning cultural analysis, animal behaviors, Greek tragedy and Biblical writings.
Gault selects and manipulates imagery, colour and form in a deliberate attempt to develop a succinct language for a complex field of enquiry. Myth fact and symbol merge in unanimous defiance of classification in bold abstract form. The bestial and mortal, meet the divine and sacred in a bizarre flirtation that is both charming and unsettling.
Kevin Harman
Harman’s practice involves creating temporary sculptures with hints of performance with important elements of recycling in our current economic climate. Reconfiguring everyday objects, which are chosen for their gritty nostalgic feel Harman aims to give an access point to the audience to view them in a new light.
The tones, colours, soul, texture, weight and shape of the materials used by Harman are sensitively taken into consideration and are developed with a running questioning of the artists own masculinity, resulting in a sympathetic body of work with often brutal undertones.
“They Had Four Years, the annual exhibition of Duncan of Jordanstone graduates a year on from qualification, has by now established itself as a hardy perennial fixture of the Dundee art calendar. Each season will bring a varied crop of a commendably high standard, although the 2009 vintage saw a change to the format in addition to a new line-up; the remit was expanded to take in entrants from all four Scottish art schools, with three artists making the final show.
Upon entering, the viewer is dominated by Dundee graduate Iain Sommerville’s self-consciously uncanny life-size monochromatic mutants, their distorted contorted bodies granting the space a tangible chamber-of-horrors frisson. Fellow alumnus Lauren Gault’s DVD You Cad (Flat Loop, Lap Loop) pairs two facing screens, the first displaying an internal view of what appears to be intimate surgery. Opposite this a painted golden hand, seductively adorned with peacock feathers, writhes to make a good go of wooing. The esoteric charm of Gault’s work continues into the following gallery, housing a pair of bold minimal sculptures whose familiar forms (organ pipes, silhouettes of limbs) hint and nudge at implied meanings. What does emerge is a practice beginning to grasp at its own very distinct, arcane language. Finally Kevin Harman, from Edinburgh College of Art, has contributed work encompassing performance, sculpture and collage, with a strategy of recycling and reconfiguring its constituent materials, be they wooden splinters, glittery fabric, live pigeons or humble bird shit. A revolving slide carousel casts light to illuminate a landscape of wooden detritus chipped from a standing ramshackle sculpture, and the projected image implies an act of avian defecation in the merest flickering of an eye.
Taken together the whole show may on occasion appear willfully impenetrable, though a more forgiving eye will grant time for the work to gain in fluency of communication and resolution. It is to the artists’ great credit that new potentialities present themselves and new lines of enquiry are suggested. What remains now is for the chance to be taken.”