all the dead dears catalogue

All the Dead Dears

Emma Talbot, People are Ghosts and Ghosts are People (detail )

Front Cover: Sarah Gillham, The Spinner (detail)

ALL THE DEAD DEARS

14 Nov - 15 Dec 2012

Ross Chisholm

Sarah Gillham

Mindy Lee

Emma Talbot

Sarah Woodfine

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Press Release | 3

The Monsters of Horror | 4

The work | 6

Biographies | 28

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‘Riddled with ghosts, to lie Deadlocked with them, taking roots as

cradles rock.’

(All the Dead Dears, Sylvia Plath)

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Press release

WW Gallery is pleased to present All the Dead Dears, an exhibition of drawing, painting, sculpture and print by Ross Chisholm, Sarah Gillham, Mindy Lee, Emma Talbot & Sarah Woodfine. Curated by Mindy Lee and Sarah Gillham, All the Dead Dears is the first in a new programme of exhibitions guest-curated by prominent artist/curator duos, which will continue throughout 2013 at WW Gallery.

A sinister lure lurks within All the Dead Dears reviving what once was into an otherworldly state. Sensual desire is twisted and broken open. This disrupted decadence tips in and out of loss, emptiness and longing.

Each artist references and retells the past, drawing from personal mem-ories, rituals, invented mythologies and historical icons. As these mo-ments are aroused, an ‘out of time’ uneasy tension sets in. Time is spliced together compressing different moments into hybrid narratives, which fuse and cyclically loop. These narratives are trapped in various fluxes of evolving, unravelling, pulling apart, lacerating, breaking or dissolving. As tension mounts there’s a sense that things are getting out of control.

Mundane or accidental moments take on increasing significance and theatricality. Public and private persona’s interchange and expose a psy-chological release, which is consumed and reabsorbed. An opulence of surface and subject tempts the viewer into All the Dead Dears.Beautiful seduction and desires in turn unveil awkwardness, violence, horror and the macabre. Trapped between attraction and repulsion, in a compressed present, the viewer is horribly ompelled to indulge.

Ross Chisholm appears courtesy of IBID Projects, Sarah Woodfine appears courtesy of Danielle Arnaud.Exhibition curated by Sarah Gillham & Mindy Lee

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The Monsters of Horror

Horror revolves around nightmares and hidden fears. The fear of the unknown, the fear of the hidden-self, and the fear of the ‘Other’ are all powerful forces that tug at the subconscious, and serve to undermine and unsettle our sense of a unified self. Horror is based on the concept of the abject – that which is ambiguous, categorically interstitial, and therefore abhorrent – and the dialectical mechanism of attraction/repulsion. It is built on the repression of deep-rooted fantasies and desires, which simmer away beneath the artfully constructed surface of the self. Because conscious recognition of these desires is too traumatic for the subject, they become repressed, and in the darker recesses of the subconscious give birth to monsters.

Here there is a conflict, whereby the representation of an underlying wish or desire that is not permitted in its naked form becomes infected by its inhibition and turns rancid. Simultaneously attractive and repulsive, it employs the imagery of horror in the pursuit of an outlet whereby the subject will not be unduly judged or punished for indulgence in their visions, which, precisely because they are horrific, are assumed to beset them and be situated beyond their control. It is for this reason that the fears evoked in horror are frequently manifested in a psychosexual register, and on the occasion when these fears erupt outward, they turn malignant and assume the appearance of something deformed and impure.

When viewed from a psychoanalytic perspective, the monsters of horror can be regarded as wish fulfilment figures. It is not in spite of the feeling of repulsion that they instil in us, but precisely because

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of it, that we are attracted to their capacity to transgress. Through this mechanism, the monster becomes an externalisation of our own internal, unacknowledged wish, which the structure of repression cloaks in horrific and repulsive imagery, before ultimately revealing it to us and issuing it forth unto the world. The same thing that appeared on initial inspection to be displeasure, is revealed under closer scrutiny to be the conduit to pleasure itself… only it has assumed a retch-inducing disguise. The monster serves as a projection, a twisted reification, of the subject’s base desires, brought into existence to annunciate and give warped form to their underlying wish.

The monsters of horror provide an abject intrusion – an unnatural interruption – into the real. We find them threatening because they are categorically interstitial: hybrids that transgress categorical distinctions and derive infernal combinations from that which is supposed to be held discrete, an infringement of the metaphysics of their mise-en-scène. At the heart of their constitution monsters are a breach of the ontological foundations of our world, an expression of the deeply held, but commonly suppressed, ambivalence that underlies the postmodern condition.

By Jack Stokoe

The above is an excerpt from ‘‘The Network of Want and the Event Horizon of Horror’”Jack Stokoe is an artist and writer, he recently had a solo show, Three Essays on Sexuality, at Furnished Space, London.

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Sarah Woodfine, Jehanne2012, pencil on paper in glass dome, perspex base, height 30, dia. 16

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Sarah Woodfine, Jehanne2012, pencil on paper in glass dome, perspex base, height 30, dia. 16

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Sarah Gillham, The Spinner2012, silk dress, rug, porcelain feet unglazed, spinning wheel. 100h x 230w x 131d

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Sarah Gillham, The Spinner (detail)2012, silk dress, rug, porcelain feet unglazed, spinning wheel. 100h x 230w x 131d

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Emma Talbot, Old Stairs You Look So High Tonight2012, watercolour on paper, 94 x 64

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Sarah Gillham, Off with her head2011, (from Cabinet of Curiosities series),fur brooch, cake pillar, doily & head offigure, 18h x 13w x 13d

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Mindy Lee, Margaret2012, acrylic on aluminium platter, 35.5h x 24.5w x 5d

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Sarah Woodfine, The Crypt2007, pencil on paper in perspex box, 23 x 31 x 23

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Ross Chisholm, 35mm combustion 4a2012, ctype print in frame, 39 x 39

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Ross Chisholm, 35mm combustion 5 (detail)2012, ctype print, 36 x 33

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Sarah Gillham, My Grandmother's wool2012, mohair wool, table and mannequin hand, 57h x31w x 31d

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Sarah Gillham, My Grandmother's wool (detail)2012, mohair wool, table and mannequin hand, 57h x31w x 31d

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Emma Talbot, People are Ghosts and Ghosts are People2012, watercolour on paper, 210 x 152

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Emma Talbot, People are Ghosts and Ghosts are People (detail)2012, watercolour on paper, 210 x 152

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Emma Talbot, People are Ghosts and Ghosts are People (detail)2012, watercolour on paper, 210 x 152

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Emma Talbot, People are Ghosts and Ghosts are People (detail)2012, watercolour on paper, 210 x 152

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Mindy Lee, John and Medusa are Overfaced2011, acrylic on paper plates and aluminium platters, tablecloth, table, 80h x 60w x 200d

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Mindy Lee, John and Medusa are Overfaced (detail)2011, acrylic on paper plates and aluminium platters, tablecloth, table, 80h x 60w x 200d

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Mindy Lee, John and Medusa are Overfaced (detail)2011, acrylic on paper plates and aluminium platters, tablecloth, table, 80h x 60w x 200d

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Mindy Lee, John and Medusa are Overfaced (detail)2011, acrylic on paper plates and aluminium platters, tablecloth, table, 80h x 60w x 200d

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About the Artists

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Ross ChisholmRoss Chisholm studied at Goldsmiths University and lives and works in London. He has shown in three solo exhibitions at IBID Projects, London: Embassies (2012) On the Banks of the Dorsal Stream (2009) and Corporation (2006). Other solo exhibitions include: The Garden of Forking Paths, Marc Jancou, New York(2011) and Grieder Contemporary, Zurich (2010).

Recent group exhibitions include Mail Please, Blyth Gallery, London (2011), Pulsed, ASC Gallery, London (2010) The Library of Babel/ In and Out of Place, Projectspace 176, London (2010), memories of the future, Sean Kelly Gallery, New York (2010) They Do Things Differently There, Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh (2010), Remap2, Athens, (2009), Being There, Galerie Akinci, Amsterdam (2009) Faces and Figures (Revisited), Marc Jancou Contemporary, New York (2008), Jerwood Contemporary Painters, Jerwood Space, London, (2008) A Stain Upon the Silence, Central St Martin’s, (2008)

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Sarah GillhamSarah Gillham studied at the Royal College of Art and lives and works in London. This year she has been included in exhibitions for the Woolgather Art Prize, Leeds and WW Solo Award|Group 2012, WW Gallery, London. She is the recipient of the Painter – Stainers Fine Arts award and recently had a solo show Homespun Mythologies at the Blyth Gallery, London.

Recent group shows include: Now the dream is over, The Blyth Gallery London (2012), Equinox, Transition gallery, London (2012), Condensation, Danielle Arnaud Gallery, London (2011), O / A Stiff Bandeau, Tricycle Gallery London (2009), The Pleasure Is All Mine, Transition gallery, London (2009) Rapunzel Rapunzel, Shoreditch Town Hall, London (2008)

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Mindy LeeMindy Lee studied at the Royal College of Art and lives and works in London. Solo exhibitions include: Spatter Platter, Jerwood Project Space, London (2010) Slipping out, Blyth Gallery, London (2008), On my own, Blyth Gallery, London (2005)

Recent group shows include: The Perfect Nude, Touring Exhibition to London and Exeter (2012), Equinox, Transition gallery, London (2012), Exeter Contemporary Open, (2011), Connection Point, Bermondsey Project Space, (2011), Afternoon Tea, WW Gallery at the Venice Bienalle (2011), Condensation, Danielle Arnaud Gallery, (2011), ART BLITZ, Transition Gallery, (2010), Little and Often, 242 Space, London (2010), Creekside Open, APT Gallery, London (2009), Breaking New, Five Hundred Dollars Gallery, London (2009), The Pleasures All Mine, Transition Gallery, London (2009)

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Emma TalbotEmma Talbot graduated from the Royal College of Art and lives and works in London. She has shown in three solo exhibitions at Transition Gallery: Bad Objects, Little Deaths (2012), Pictures From my Heart (2010) and I’ll be Your Mirror (2005). Other solo exhibitions include You Would Cry Too If It Happened To You, Gallery Kusseneers, Antwerp (2011) The Solo Project, Basel (2011), A Sheffield Song, BLOC (2011)

Recent Group Shows include: Me and My Shadow, Kate MacGarry, (2011), TOLD, Hales Gallery, London (2011), The Life of The Mind, New Art Gallery Walsall, Nieves in Tokyo, Gallery No.12, Tokyo (2010) Party!, New Art Gallery, Walsall (2010), One Cannot Be Thwarted by ntidisestablishmentarianism, Primo Alonso, London (2009) Storytime, Gallery North, Newcastle, (2009) Her work will feature in The Power of Paper, Saatchi Gallery

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Sarah Woodfine Sarah Woodfine studied at the Royal Academy Schools from 1991 to 1995. Selected group exhibitions include: Tatton Park Biennial (2012); ‘What the Folk Say’, Compton Verney, (2011); ‘House and Home’, Harewood House, (2009); ‘The Beguiling…’, Bury St Edmunds Art Gallery, (2008); ‘Drawing Inspiration’, Abbot Hall Gallery, (2006); ‘Only Make-Believe’, Compton Verney and ‘The Real Ideal’, Sheffield Millennium Gallery, (2005).

Solo shows include: ‘Somewhere’, Ha Gamle Prestegard, Norway, (2007). In 2006 she produced the Artangel ‘Nights of London’ Interaction Project ‘When Night Draws In’. In 2004 she won the Jerwood Drawing rize. Her work is held in various public and private collections including the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Middlesbrough Art Gallery and Ha Gamle Prestegard, Norway.