Choose Your Own Adventure
Hagan Saint Philip Gallery,
112 Lincoln Ave. #514,
Bronx, New York,
USA.
Map of
112 Lincoln Ave
Bronx, NY 10454-4448
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Robin Footitt, 'Choose Your Own
Adventure'
April 5 - May 10, 2006
Opening Reception: April 5, 2006, 6-10 pm
Hagan Saint Philip is pleased to announce the solo exhibition of work by British
artist Robin Footitt. The exhibition includes prints, drawings, sketchbooks,
appropriated comic strips and photographs, which weave common motifs and
effects such as empty landscapes, political monuments and theatrical explosions
into ambiguous narratives of social panic, geopolitical apocalypse and natural
disasters.
In the continuing series, Comic on Terror, Footitt has assembled found
comic book frames, each taken from a separate source. The original narrative
sequence and the interrelationship between one frame and its abutting partner
are lost. Each frame highlights a moment before the occurrence of an unknown
catastrophe, perhaps nuclear annihilation, global or national invasion,
political strife or revolution. While the proximate cause of panic or fear has
been severed from the narrative, the characters, through either their thoughts
or speech, reveal a sense of dread or suspicion, and the viewer is left with
only with their nascent effect.
Similarly, in Natural Disaster Tag, Park Before and Park After,
drawings and appropriated photographs of explosions highlight the repetitive use
of special effects in blockbuster films in which such effects act as the plot
themselves. By omitting much of the actual narrative and isolating the effect,
Footitt distances the viewer from any visual suspense or shock.
Other works in the exhibition show characters from disaster and revenge films
and political thrillers in wry and unexpected ways. In Kong Stones, a
large wall drawing, finely drawn brush marks depict a striated mountainous
surface. Viewed horizontally, the shape is actually that
of King Kong. More explicitly in Bronson Saves,
a small image of the iconic actor is emblazoned on the stars-and-stripes
background of the National Rifle Association. Although the actor looms large in
film roles as avenger and saviour, here, downgraded, downsized and placed among
larger and more graphically charged images of towering mountain ranges and
isolated homes, his iconic image signals the approach or possibility of disaster
he is incapable of preventing.
About the artist
Robin Footitt graduated from Central Saint Martins College of Art, London in
2004. Since 2001 his work has been included in a number of group shows both in
the UK and Germany. He has contributed to several publications including
BlackBook and has recently been listed in the New Talent section of London
arts magazine, Marmalade. This year he was awarded an internship at The Museum
of Modern Art in New York. He currently resides in the South Bronx.
For more information, please contact Tim McDonnell at 718 877 1176 or Wayne Northcross at 917 608 3271.
"There is always a certain safety with a recognisable special effect. A safety which allows you to stand back and see it for what it is, empty space filled with a spectacle. We would often spin tales which would be disturbed by such an effect, the empty spaces conjured up with life. One such story reads as follows.
A man walks alone between his shack far in the desert to the nearest convenience store. The walk is long, measured by his strides at about fifty minutes, travelling 5000 strides per hour. On his way the journey becomes secondary. This is the space where neither destination is in his field of vision and the walk is stripped to its elements. Speed and direction. Intuition guides this man as if a compass were hooked to his chest as he feels the magnetic pull due north. It is an isolated time for such a man incapable of becoming part of an audience. He continues past dust tree marker and stone, forward in a mission of two halves ever to be repeated when his convenience needs to be satisfied. A walk so desolate that it recalls time.
Time arrived back a few minutes later and the man is surprised. Where once the memory of his destination would have arrived, he is now impeded by a ghostly presence. Elements selected from a form of blown glass with the fragility of static dust, inward layers of grey, green and orange bulbed forwards. It became illuminated. It made no sound but the escalating movement, similar to a cloud unfolding itself, pressed play inside the man’s tape deck. It played a BBC archive compilation of explosion sound effects. Once it reached the end of the first side the form in front of him imploded revealing nothing. The convenience store was not there and the man had no idea where he was.
There is always a certain safety with a recognised special effect. A safety which allows you to stand back and see it for what it is, empty space filled with a spectacle. There is no intimate way of recording such a feeling. The event itself is so desperate to be accepted as realistic, or believable, CGI worlds must be interacting with real people as if their gravity holds the landscape down and commits it to memory.
Does it fill in gaps which imagination used to occupy and has the need for new visual forms damaged the satisfaction of a mental picture of an idea? When an effect is unleashed upon an unsuspecting audience is this an advancement or an advertisement for the process?"
- Robin Footitt