The SHOWstudio.com Shop is pleased to present Inside/Out an exhibition featuring work by Dan Colen, Amie Dicke, Naomi Filmer, Ruth Hogben, Shaun Leane, Terence Koh, Alister Mackie, Carson McColl, Marilyn Minter, Ariana Page Russell, and Professor Helen Storey.
The use of abject imagery in art and fashion can be traced throughout history. The Dadaists were of course enthralled with transgression and taboo but since well before the Renaissance, painters expressed a fascination with blood. When the Whitney Museum gave the movement a name in 1993, recent experiment gained more viable traction. Radical artists like Andres Serrano and Helen Chadwick started working with bodily fluids and fashion designers including Hussien Chalayan and Alexander McQueen started representing death, trauma and decay.
It is from this point that Inside/Out departs. Where the visual language of the early 90s was dark and obscuring, all of the works in this exhibition thrust elements that are typically kept on the inside onto the outside and aestheticises them. Where Marilyn Minter and Ariana Page Russell make physiological reactions larger than life, Naomi Filmer, Shaun Leane, and Professor Helen Storey literally give us a chance to see inside ourselves, using body parts and internal organs as visual fodder. Where Terence Koh and Dan Colen transgress propriety engaging with the scatological in their formal compositions, Amie Dicke snips the bodies of movie stars and fashion models into a thin web of contours.
Together, the pointed content that makes up Inside/Out demonstrates how abjection serves as a means to symbolise liberation from the confines of commerce and norms of representation and, consequently makes space for a new aesthetic of beauty.
Additional artworks and artifacts by major artists and Fashion houses that relate to theme of the exhibition will be added throughout the run of Inside/Out.
In tandem with the physical exhibition, SHOWstudio.com will broadcast performances from the LiveStudio in Bruton Place by Amie Dicke, Millie Brown and others. Objects made during the LiveStudio will then be displayed in the Shop.
Image 1 Install Shot
Image 2 Install Shot
Image 3 Install Shot
Image 4 Video Room
Image 5 Video Room
Image 6 Terence Koh, The Whole Family, 2008. Image courtsey Peres Projects, Berlin Los Angeles.
Image 7 Ariana Page Russell, Seeth, Archival inkjet print, 30" x 20", 2010
Image 8 Helen Story Foundation, Anaphase dress, Silk, mirrored paper, viscose jersey, 1997
Image 9 Dan Colen, Untitled (Birdshit), Painting, oil on canvas, 24" x 17.9", 2007
Image 10 Marilyn Minter, Green Pink Caviar, 2009 (video still). Image courtesy of the artist and Salon 94, New York.