The Running Horse

Songs of Ordinary Madness is a group exhibition bringing together nine artists from different nationalities and backgrounds consciously looking to evaluate how subjectivity pertains to the ‘peculiar’ in everyday life. The works commissioned for the exhibition are constricted by a rule of 50 x 50 x 50 cm, which will format the works or feed the concept of the end projects.

This exhibition contemplates the ‘everyday’ through the artists’ eyes, hence sublimating their individuality, their quirks, their ‘norm’. This process brings to the fore experiences that we subconsciously accept as part of our daily life, but that are in fact charged with contradictions and seem uncanny and bizarre at times.

Songs of Ordinary Madness invites the viewer to delve into the artist’s subliminal spirit, and experience through a walk in the loosely divided exhibition room a series of artworks relating to the grotesque and bizarre. The body is the main actor of this exhibition, whether represented literally as a state of mind or projected as an extension of the artists as a self-portrait.

Songs of Ordinary Madness has inspired artists to produce artworks related to self-portraiture and states of un-canniness. German artist David Siepert created Lucid Dreams for this exhibition, a self-portrait bathtub made from melted Ricola Bonbons, the famous Swiss brand aux proprietés bienfaisantes. “A bonbon stimulates all your senses; you suck it, taste it, touch it with your tongue, and you have this incredible smell of flowers and herbs of a mountain meadow in your nose”. The herbal blend of the candy perspires through the tub, and entices the viewers to come closer and smell it.

Siepert explores the fields of dreams and the passiveness of dreaming. “A 'Lucid Dream' is any dream in which one is aware that one is dreaming. In this kind of dream one sometimes is able to exert control to a certain extent and manipulate the dream; to intervene in a creative way. But also it is possible that one is caught and paralyzed in such a dream, unable to wake up.” The bathtub complements this thought process by incarnating the passiveness experienced during the act of bathing, lying in the water on ones own yet feeling protected.

British-Lebanese artist Carlo Keshishian’s Circumlocutions deals with awareness of the self, balancing the individual as separate from others and at once social and connected to the environment. Circumlocutions is a clockwise rotating painting where the artist develops both of his skills with a realistic self-portrait in the center girdled with a spiraling diary: “…a concoction of words used to describe something that could otherwise be simply taken in a single manifestation… words are presented in spiral form so as to reflect how words, thoughts and analysis needing to be captured coherently just suck you in to a deeper and more difficult place.”

Keshishian discusses truthfulness of self-representation as he presents his interpretation of himself to the viewers saying, “The window to the soul is directly in the eyes”. He invites the viewer further into the piece, “You can look in my eyes and find the answer, be it abstracted, a feeling, a wave of fragments that express what I’m made of. Or you can read the elaborate text…”

Lebanese artist Youmna Habbouche also uses words to represent a repetition of sleep/non-sleep. Nawmi, from the Arabic for My Sleep, is a digital print triptych on a structure resembling a vanity mirror. Nawmi evokes sleep as a state of being and non-being, a rhythmic depiction of the artist’s relation to sleep as a purgatory of a state of consciousness. In each panel of the triptych, Habbouche develops a text of her relation to the recurring state of reduced consciousness in Arabic over a photographed black and white background of sheets, imprinted from her own bed.

The artist describes the state of sleep/non-sleep as an intimate, solitary but also frantic experience, redolent of the anxiety relating to the renewal of a life/death experience, “…as if you die and live again. Everyday.” The ordinary madness is extended by the interactive use of the structure that viewers can rotate and re-arrange according to their viewing preference.

In the group of artists dealing with the cognitive boundaries of the inner/outer, public/private, conscious/subconscious dilemmas, Lebanese artist Talar Aghbashian deals with the theme of ordinary madness as a continuation of her work, with a minimal painting depicting a devastated seashore after a storm. The gloomy landscape figures exhausted and the storm in the background either approaching or propagating placing the viewer in a state of fear and anxiety at the brink of a natural disaster out of our control.

In the same line of thinking, Laura Pharaon produced Blue Mist Collision in reference to agate, a coloured banded stone. Blue Mist Collision is a mixed media piece on canvas made with paper, polymer emulsion, acrylic medium, ink, sand, concrete, and thick salt. Pharaon was inspired by the title of the show and more specifically the rhythmic notion of ‘songs’ where various elements ‘meet in an inexplicable alchemy’. Her work often recalls the earth and very organic materials; Blue Mist Collision appears like a block, extracted from a wall that underwent several changes related to climate, the passing of time, etc. described by the artist as the tune played on and on by the substance constituting the earth.

Japanese artist Emi Miyashita further develops her unfettered miniature pencil drawings, creating new sets in sexual landscapes. Inspired by sadomasochism in this series, the new works presented show a chase of naked women riding running horses and sometimes a camel, chasing bouncing breasts and followed by a horde of minute men and punctuated by couples dressed in black leather clothing whipping one another. Miyashita’s drawings become tales of their own, when the relation between the experience and symbolic of sex and is constantly examined. The drawings are installed with available magnifying glasses, to allow viewers to appropriate the work at their leisure. Seemingly humourous, the facetious artworks constantly evolve in their own storyline, mocking with wit a story that could well be ours.

British artist and renowned set designer, Robert Storey produced Repeat Your Rhythm, a 220cm high wood and acrylic sculpture that explores the transparent nature of our own complex make up and highlights the chronic patterns one creates. Blurring the boundaries of installation and design, Robert's interests lie in exploring pattern, form and material. Although a self-portrait, the work strongly transcends the tangible aspect of the human body and portrays it in a more powerful and spiritual way. The base of the sculpture is made of wood, and is topped with a light translucent Perspex structure, made of a clear central spine holding a 5-layered, equidistant, translucent, coloured sheets. A strong light is placed in the wooden base, reflecting the square patterns of the Perspex sculpture on the ceiling. Repeat Your Rhythm is a celebration of the human, reflecting both power and simplicity of form.

Untitled by Reid Peppard is one of the exhibition’s most conceptual representation of the theme songs of ordinary madness. The artwork is a pink dyed taxidermy pigeon, lying on its back with its head reclining off the plinth and "vomiting" fibre optic light that reaches the floor. The pigeon has Hematite stones in place of its eyes and according to Peppard, “The Native Americans believed that this stone could make you invincible in battle, which seems appropriate because I think of this pigeon as a sort of super future warrior from another dimension.” Peppard has been working with taxidermy for a few years now, creating jewellery, accessories and artworks. Untitled is the first of a series is fluorescent colors and incorporating light.

Debut by Yijun Liao is a photograph that puts on show the artists bottom coming out of red velvet curtains. This humoristic and very straightforward piece is a cynical commentary of our times, also reminding the famous photograph of Einstein sticking his tongue out.