Inside/Out
SHOWstudio, Bruton Place, London
Inside/Out
SHOWstudio, Bruton Place, London
On June 26th, 2010, Carrie Scott and the SHOWstudio.com Shop launched Inside/Out an exhibition featuring work by Dan Colen, Amie Dicke, Naomi Filmer, Ruth Hogben, Shaun Leane, Terence Koh, Alister Mackie, Carson McColl, Marilyn Minter, Ariana Page Russell, and Professor Helen Storey.
Please find the press release for the exhibition, written by Scott, below.
The use of abject imagery in art and fashion can be traced throughout history. The Dadaists were of course enthralled with transgression and taboo but since well before the Renaissance, painters expressed a fascination with blood. When the Whitney Museum gave the movement a name in 1993, recent experiment gained more viable traction. Radical artists like Andres Serrano and Helen Chadwick started working with bodily fluids and fashion designers including Hussien Chalayan and Alexander McQueen started representing death, trauma and decay.
It is from this point that Inside/Out departs. Where the visual language of the early 90s was dark and obscuring, all of the works in this exhibition thrust elements that are typically kept on the inside onto the outside and aestheticises them. Where Marilyn Minter and Ariana Page Russell make physiological reactions larger than life, Naomi Filmer, Shaun Leane, and Professor Helen Storey literally give us a chance to see inside ourselves, using body parts and internal organs as visual fodder. Where Terence Koh and Dan Colen transgress propriety engaging with the scatological in their formal compositions, Amie Dicke snips the bodies of movie stars and fashion models into a thin web of contours.
Together, the pointed content that makes up Inside/Out demonstrates how abjection serves as a means to symbolise liberation from the confines of commerce and norms of representation and, consequently makes space for a new aesthetic of beauty.
Additional artworks and artifacts by major artists and Fashion houses that relate to theme of the exhibition will be added throughout the run of Inside/Out.