The Running Horse

back

Desires, Nightmares and Dreams II brings together such distinct artists as Aaron Johnson, Carlo Keshishian, Emi Miyashita, Greely Myatt and David Siepert. This second edition builds upon and develops the first edition, Desires, Nightmares and Dreams I, to further consolidate and propagate The Running Horse’s contemporary art perception.

---

 

With this edition, we want to reinforce the validity of art as an emotional relationship – involving both the artist and the viewer – that cannot be reduced to simply a matter of technique or concept, through artists whose idiosyncratic ap- proaches at first glance seem to escape any thematic or practice categorisation.

 

We propose artists, and hence art, that we find transcends‘in- stitutional’ categorisation and socio-political fixations so prevalent now (particularly in our part of the world, but that’s a different discussion altogether). What is common to all of their works is a joyful celebration of the human, the ability to bring to the fore unconscious fantasies through a complex process of symbolisation and identification.

 

In these works, thinking/concept is not elevated above feeling/ emotion, but rather subject and form join to elevate the viewer above the mundane and banal. To integrate feeling and thinking is to overcome what T.S. Eliot called ‘dissociation of sensibility’, which he thought to be a pervasive issue in modernity. This dichotomy of the cognitive/affective is a central issue of the formulation of selfhood, which undoubtedly enriches any artistic experience.

 

This sublimation is what we want to present to the viewer, a concept so dear to Louise Bourgeois whose work never fell short of sublimity and who once said, ‘I feel that if we are able to sublimate, in any way we do, that we should feel thankful. I cannot talk about any other profession, where the artist is blessed with this power.’

---

 

This focus on the emotional experience before art does not intend to take from its conceptual power, it is merely a response to the more prevalent practices which seem to have moved ever closer to the ‘conceptual’ end of the continuum. With the works selected for this exhibition, we hope to elicit both thinking and feeling.

 

When selecting the artists and works for this exhibition we tried to create an experience of attraction and repulsion, of un- derstanding and miscomprehension. The contradictory presentation of form and content in the works we bring to you in this show share the phantastic exploration of the artists’minds come to life.

 

Aaron Johnson’s The Sword Swallower staggers with its imposing cartoon-like king-monster performing an ancient art that was considered to be an act conferring on the performer divin- ityandpower.The “king” swallows a sword,with a smile and a demoniac look, and pierces through his heart and torso in the process. Johnson seems to have caught this grotesque creature at the exact instant of penetration with blood splattering out and a frozen smile, and only the alarmed eyes betraying this horrible moment. 

 

Yet, The Sword Swallower has a deceptive allure, where exuberant colours and patterns and organic shapes contradict the act they portray, opposing form and content. This contradiction is characteristic of Johnson's work that bursts with a constant life and death drive depicting violently pierced and disintegrating bodies that are, nevertheless, full of life and visceral emotions, performing violent acts of both love and hate. The immense details, colours and collages in his innovative style of 'reverse- painted acrylic polymer peel painting'intensify this aggressive sense of penetration.

 

The uncanny feelings of attraction and repulsion are a recurring experience when interacting with the works presented in this exhibition. This play with the grotesque and the beautiful and the seemingly infinite stories that unfold are also a predominant feature of Emi Miyashita's micro-scale pencil drawings. These drawings create with wit and humour scenes where minute people are playing, climbing, pinching, cutting, sleep- ing on disproportionately giant sexual organs. Yet, as with Johnson, the explicit depiction does not bring a grimace to the face, rather one cannot help but smile when looking at her work through the many magnifying glasses that Miyashita picked out herself.

 

Miyashita tries “to create sexual fantasies in a non-sexual context, for example without coitus references” in her work. Her disassembled vision of the body is uneasy and torn up, a complex experience urges her to completely objectify the sexual parts and use them as integral constituents of her fantastical landscapes. Miyashita tackles with humour such complex sub- jects as “the human existence, life and death, the structure of the curious sexualities of the human”. Her work is very much rooted in psychology, especially psychology relating to childhood and infancy memories. Unlike Johnson’s overwhelming figures, the work does not render itself as easily to the viewer; the scale of the drawings makes it necessary to use a mag- nifying glass to access them. It is an opposition of extrovert content with a very reticent presentation.

 

The persistence of the production process in Johnson’s and Miyashita’s works brings about a sense of liberation as to the experience released by the artists. Carlo Keshishian’s work brings about a similar feeling as he uses his art to release sometimes daunting or repetitive thoughts through doodles, representations of the everyday and his obsessive spirals. In Daydream, Keshishian seems to have to a certain extent abandoned his horror vacui and represents quite literally what could be a frac- tion of a second inside a woman’s mind, what looks like men, friends, random objects and memories that could be part of this woman’s experiences, or the artist’s interpretation of a woman’s expectations. 

 

The work captures a range of thoughts and feelings, some seem to be more complete than others. Here the imaginary seems to blend with the real just as memories are rarely an exact representation of an event but a selective vision of our feelings toward that event. The composition of the painting contrasts the image we reveal of ourselves with our bodies andspeech and the reality of what goes on inside of us. Similarly, Overload illustrates a fleeting moment in this man's fantasy cloud after a possible masturbation... His thoughts and im- agination are dense and overwhelming, the cloud taking two thirds of the page space. Daydream and Overload look like au- tomatic drawings reflecting subconscious desires that appear in the raw, irrational mind where time cannot be measured in the traditional way.  

 

This play with what is unsaid and concealed is also a recurring theme in Greely Myatt’s work. With his comics and manga-like speech bubbles and clouds, Myatt has been exploring gallery spaces and public spaces, such as a billboard, a waiting room in a hospital to provoke thought and take our minds off the daily troubles. These bubbles all come from recycled, found wood or metal as does his work in general. However, they evolve and change in shape and in colour with the space that holds them, particularly that Greely is producing a bubbles page made es- pecially for The Running Horse space. 

 

With these comics pages, Myatt creates steel comic cells with cut-out speech bubbles that are contained in these cells. Al- though these compositions made from retrieved steel are all blank, the bubbles convey a lot of meaning and thought. The shapes of the blank balloons are not foreign to many, particularly those who read comics or manga, with the standard ones for normal speech, the cloud-like ones to visualise excitement ... Yet, they might seem out of context, reticent communica- tion, that barely convey the state of mind of the speaker; how- ever, the ‘unsaid’ is left to the viewer to appropriate, to project their own thoughts, memories and feelings. Through the view- ers’ interaction with his work, Myatt hopes that these bubbles become their voices and thoughts.

 

This idea of familiar objects placed in unfamiliar settings or portrayed in an unusual way is also a characteristic of David Siepert’s photography. In his Simulacrum project (2009), Siep- ert played with familiar, “real” home settings, such as kitchens and bedrooms, with human presence that upon closer inspec- tion turned out to be pictures of a showroom (Ikea Switzerland in particular) with price tags attached to items. Siepert’s Inside Out series presented in this exhibition pertains to the extreme physical manifestation of the bleak, the strange and the un- known using quite familiar middle class houses in different neighbourhoods in different countries.

 

The artist, in this on-going project, takes shots of the house fa- cades and their close surroundings (garden, trees, road, fence). The houses look like any pictorial image present in the collec- tive consciousness, or drawn by a child: square body, boat- shed tiled roofs, and rectangular windows. Siepert’s technique strongly supports this idea of deserted, uncanny houses as the colours in the photographs had shifted due to long exposures of up to 30 minutes, transfiguring still familiar contexts into foreign, haunted landscapes. Although these images portray a certain voyeurism and the light could indicate some hu- man presence, the exposure has expressly burnt out any such presence and the happenings inside these homes is left to the viewer’s imagination.

 

These artists’ works unite sensibility and thought and hence create reflective expression without being purely intellectual. They celebrate the universal human unconscious rather than narrow socio-political ideological visions, and they do it, moreover, with irony and humour as any expression so self-aware of its power and weakness must do. This ability to reflect on oneself with such lightness could probably be our surest way to emotional survival.