Frivolous Convulsions is an exhibition (12 January – 25 February 2018) which collides carnivalesque and celebratory renditions of modern life.
Aliki Krikidi // Babette Semmer // Grant Foster // Ben Westley Clarke // Denzil Forrester // Lucy Stein // David Harrison // Steven Allan // Melissa Kime // Vanessa Mitter // Jack Catling // Robin Bale // Stuart Brisley
Curated by Vanessa Mitter and Ben Westley Clarke
“In a world that has really been turned on its head, truth is a moment of falsehood“ – Guy Debord
“There is nothing funny about Halloween. This sarcastic festival reflects, rather, an infernal demand for revenge by children on the adult world” – Jean Baudrillard
The ubiquity of photography and advertising and our involuntary immersion in the mediated world assembled by it, demand a creative human response. How can we live, uninhibited, when constantly bombarded by the instructive and the inauthentic? How can we know embodied, unselfconscious experience in the society of images and spectacle? Perhaps a solution lies in bearing witness to its cacophonic multiplicity of truths. Perhaps the highly personalised, playful nature of the activity of painting confronts its tyranny directly, with its antidote.
Image: David Harrison, Kissed by a Witch (One Night in the Woods), 2017
