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william pope.l snow, spraypaint, hair, sperm & baloney 18 June – 11 August 2007 |
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william pope.l snow, spraypaint, hair, sperm & baloney 18 June – 11 August 2007 Reception & book signing for the artist, Wednesday 20 June 6-8pm At some point while moving through William Pope.L's second solo exhibition at Kenny Schachter ROVE entitled snow, spraypaint, hair, sperm & baloney, you will encounter the artwork Stuff Animal Training. Like many works in this exhibition Stuff operates between representations and occupies a space which is a network of attitudes, practices and materials. The conglomeration that is Stuff seems to return all stares. Whilst its single eye gives it a sense of life, its trash and junk hindquarters suggest it is closer to detritus. Its center is occupied by a wistful, truncated and barely recognisable hippopotamus resplendent in an ill-fitting toupee torn from a glossy magazine. Stuff is a member of a family of artworks Pope.L calls Semen Pictures. These works are stacks, spills and piles of flotsam and jetsam culled, assembled, photographed, scanned, enlarged and now hover between sentience and objecthood. Stuff suffers and sings, floating amidst coffee grounds, hair, medium, bits of wire, torn photos, cum, burnt matches and nail clippings - some of the artist's favourite materials and easily found around his home where most of the “Pictures” were incubated. For this exhibition, Pope.L stages the tension between the brute fact of things and our insistence to reconcile a state of “between” into a common sense. In Documentary, he layers processed sandwich meat and photocopies of ubiquitous foreign food businesses. The juxtaposition is very direct. Each slice of meat displays a photo of a different establishment, and is arranged, one after the other, like the frames of a film. Oxidation and gravity cause the slices to weep, the photocopies to yellow and blur, uniting the image which is surface (flesh) and the surface which is image (photo). William Pope.L's 30 year multi-disciplinary art practice adapts unconventional materials and approaches to render explorations whose pleasures are philosophical, emotive and the everyday, for example: change, dissolution, melancholy - and the quiet, fierce human will to play in the space between the death in what we know and the life in what we cannot imagine. Catalogue: Accompanying the exhibition will be a 40 page hardcover publication with essays by Iain Kerr and William Pope.L. Available from early June, it will be strictly limited to 800 copies only, please contact simon@rovetv.net for information and to order. Press: For additional information and press images please contact: KENNY SCHACHTER ROVE 33-34 Hoxton Square London N1 6NN UK
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