Galerie E.G.P
PRESS RELEASE
GALERIE E.G.P will present at ART13 London YOUNG GALLERIES section a solo exhibition
by OLIVER BRAGG entitled “IS IT”.
Individually the words in the title function as simple, frequently used, words. Put
together the Amalgamation of the words "is" and "it", are used either to signify an
exclamation or a question in itself in contemporary English or Singlish (Singaporean
English).
The title being suggestive of the content of work where new meanings and/or
connotations are formed when there is re-imagination of culture, where fragments of
real world culture may be found but aren’t familiar. Re-aligning the space between
everyday things to form a parallel universe with abstract narratives, whose origins are
traceable through a process akin to Internet browsing.
The idea of knowledge and lack of knowledge is in turn explored: searching for
meaning in signs, symbols and language that surround us, to create a world of
cultural amnesia, confabulated construction and new iconography, a universe of
potential outcomes of randomness and the absurdity of abstract meanderings.
The centrepiece of the show will be a fabricated
cardboard post-apocalyptic ‘hut’, coalescing of
architectural styles, into which people can enter.
The fabrication plays on the idea of, make shift,
itinerate living, temporariness and fragility and
adopts a mix of misappropriated aesthetic styles,
re-working conventional visual language.
The inside space will consist of a mock up
lounge space with a sofa and TV. On the wall
objects and pictures will hang as individual
artworks.
16 Marlow Workshops | Calvert Avenue | London E2 7JN | UK | + 44 (0)20 7739 7800
20, rue Germain Pilon | 75018 Paris | FR | + 33 (0)1 42 51 31 04
[email protected] | www.artegp.com
Galerie E.G.P
The TV screen will show ‘The Greatest ever TV Game show wins’ a short film, that
merges YouTube footage with acted out spoof pieces. The film will be spliced with
fictional adverts, adverts for mundane objects, organisations that don’t exist and
ineffable products. Some of which will take their subjects from Wikipedia random
searches: an on-going project, which seeks to examine the discovery of knowledge
through serendipity and the use of education.
Works in and around the installation include:
‘Untitled (Yeti)’
This resembles the trophy heads of hunters and a
prerogative of the rich that epitomises man’s desire to
conquer and destroy his natural environment and
those that inhabit it, however in this instance the
environment is a Primark, Polyester dystopia. A fake
plastic aesthetic in a world where labour is outsourced
to the poor, developing countries and the divide
between rich and poor is vast. It is a mystic object of
the past meeting the future in an alternate reality.
‘Halo’
A looped film turned into a wall mounted religious relic like object featuring a refilming of a CCTV screen on a bus. Here a bus handle glows in the fluorescent city
light: a contemporary phenomenological beacon within the everyday.
‘Bull’s Head’
A photograph of an emergency pull sign
on a London train reminiscent of Picasso’s
‘Bull’s
Head’.
Picasso’s
Bull’s
head
symbolising an assertion of the transforming
power of the human imagination at a time
when human values were under siege.
Picasso had found the bicycle parts that
make up the work by chance and saw
them immediately as a bull's head. This
symbol can then be recognised within the
re-imagined contemporary landscape in
an act of looking and recognising and the
potentiality that might lie in reading
between the lines.
Other works will be left open and may include text-based pieces, which will reveal
themselves in the lead up to the show.
16 Marlow Workshops | Calvert Avenue | London E2 7JN | UK | + 44 (0)20 7739 7800
20, rue Germain Pilon | 75018 Paris | FR | + 33 (0)1 42 51 31 04
[email protected] | www.artegp.com