Tag Archives: power

Documentalist

This month, we will explore the Collective Gallerys latest exhibition Documentalist – an international group show presenting work that explores blurred boundaries between fiction and reality through drawing, sculpture and film.

Chris Evans deliberately muddles the roles of artist and patron, genius and muse. Evans will show two sculptural pieces Warm Hermaphrodite and Repeat Horizon, both of which form visual motifs created by Evans in response to interviews with four elderly Italian politicians. All were asked about sacrifice and after a life in the public eye, on the choices they made.

Deimantas Narkevicius will show his film Revisiting Solaris. Trained as a sculptor, Narkevicius has developed a practice, based on video and film that explores fascinating, problematic and overlooked passages of recent post-communist European history, including his personal history of living and working in Lithuania during the soviet era and after.

Suzanne Treister’s practice deals with notions of identity, history, power and the hallucinatory. She will present Alchemy, a series of works which transcribe front pages of international daily newspapers into alchemical drawings, reframing the world as a place animated by strange forces, powers and belief systems.

Joining us to explore individual works and to discuss each artist’s relationship to the title Documentalist will be Kate Gray, Director of The Collective Gallery.

Glittering Shadows

Dani Marti’s practice is stimulated by what we perceive as challenges within the act of portrayal. He is fascinated by what lies behind the surface of the subject as an essence to be grasped or sought after through attempting to represent it. The dialectic between the possibility and simultaneous hopelessness of this endeavour emerges in the abstraction of large-scale woven works, and videos that borrow from the language of documentary.

For Marti, both weaving and (video) taping represent an act of bondage, a ritual which enables the artist to possess the person that is portrayed. The works become representational, not only of states of feelings, but also of regimes of class and power, and the idiosyncrasies of personal psychosexualities.

Dani Marti studied fine art in Sydney, gaining a Master of Arts at the College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales, in 2000; and in Glasgow, gaining a MFA at the GSA, in 2006.

He will be joining us to talk about his work.