Duncan Marquiss
31 Oct - 23 Dec 2009
DUNCAN MARQUISS
"There is no you"
October 31st – December 23rd, 2009
Opening: October 30th, 6 p.m. – 8 p.m.
Galerie Peter Kilchmann is pleased to announce Duncan Marquiss’ solo exhibition, "There is no you". Following his first exhibition in 2007 in our project room, the young Scottish artist presents a selection of his latest works. He will show a series of new drawings, frottage works, as well as a video piece. The following text is written by the artist himself:
“We’re all schizophrenic, with defective emotional lives – flattening of affect, it’s called.”
Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, 1968
The frottage works are rubbings of clothes made with chalk on a thin fabric, presented in groups pinned to the wall unframed. To me the empty clothes suggest absent or invisible figures frozen in space, perhaps the abandoned clothes have taken on a life of their own. Once rubbed by the bodies of their wearers the clothes are now replicated through rubbing as flattened out doppelgangers. Frottage can have an uncanny semi-photographic quality, but like photography it is a reductive process that loses detail and mid tonal ranges - which Josef Alber’s described in his text Interaction of Colour, 1963 as the subtle human greys.
The chalk I use in the frottage works is also used in my drawings to prepare a ground to work on. Vertical chalk strokes, or circles of dust rubbed into the paper, create spaces for the drawings to exist in. The chalk ground seems to reveal a space behind the page, yet the dust sits on top of the paper creating tension between surface and illusory depth. Several of the drawings use textured paper, which allows areas of the paper to remain untouched by pencil and chalk. The repeating microdots of exposed paper sit below the drawing, making images appear semi-translucent. The regular pattern of the paper’s texture creates a lattice comparable perhaps to the grain of film and photography or a silk-screen print mesh.
Many of the drawings depict figures framed by boundaries of chalk strokes. Portraying a subject can simplify, stylise or misrepresent it, but my hope is that a drawing can become an object in it’s own right. The drawings often use negative presentation; figures without faces, features obscured by hoods or smudges of chalk; empty space that asks the viewer’s imagination to fill in the gaps. Luminous shadows and translucent colours make subjects seem like ghosts or projected holograms. Several of the drawings are based on photographs I took in department stores of mute mannequins and ecstatic displays of commodities. I find these shops depressing and fascinating; time seems distorted into a continuous present, surfaces are rich yet flat.
In previous works I often used appropriated imagery as source material, borrowing images from cinema or art history. This is in part an investigation into how a person’s identity can be shaped by cultural artefacts, how they condition our tastes and imagination - consuming us as we consume them. The predominance of mediated experiences in contemporary life leaves us wondering how much of our identity is our own?
At the rear of the gallery is a new video work, which shows a figure walking down a narrow pathway. We see this person from two camera angles, one from in front of them and one from behind. These two continuous shots are edited together frame by frame in an attempt to watch the scene simultaneously from two perspectives. This almost cancels each viewpoint out, creating instead a flickering image of a figure continually advancing and retreating in uncertain space. The persistence of vision is employed by cinema to animate still images, but in this work it superimposes images making them appear translucent whilst flattening the depth of the film frame. Like some of the drawings the video depicts an individual trapped within formal abstractions.
Duncan Marquiss (born 1979 in Aberdeenshire, Scotland) lives and works in London. Before graduating from the Glasgow School of Art in 2005, Marquiss celebrated first successes in his young career: in 2003, he exhibited at „Zenomap“ at the Scottish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. The artist currently has works on display as part of the Scottish retrospective, "Running Time, Artist Films in Scotland 1960 to Now”, at The Dean Gallery, in Edinburgh, until the end of November. Another of Marquiss’ current and ongoing projects is his participation in the LUX Associates Program in London.
"There is no you"
October 31st – December 23rd, 2009
Opening: October 30th, 6 p.m. – 8 p.m.
Galerie Peter Kilchmann is pleased to announce Duncan Marquiss’ solo exhibition, "There is no you". Following his first exhibition in 2007 in our project room, the young Scottish artist presents a selection of his latest works. He will show a series of new drawings, frottage works, as well as a video piece. The following text is written by the artist himself:
“We’re all schizophrenic, with defective emotional lives – flattening of affect, it’s called.”
Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, 1968
The frottage works are rubbings of clothes made with chalk on a thin fabric, presented in groups pinned to the wall unframed. To me the empty clothes suggest absent or invisible figures frozen in space, perhaps the abandoned clothes have taken on a life of their own. Once rubbed by the bodies of their wearers the clothes are now replicated through rubbing as flattened out doppelgangers. Frottage can have an uncanny semi-photographic quality, but like photography it is a reductive process that loses detail and mid tonal ranges - which Josef Alber’s described in his text Interaction of Colour, 1963 as the subtle human greys.
The chalk I use in the frottage works is also used in my drawings to prepare a ground to work on. Vertical chalk strokes, or circles of dust rubbed into the paper, create spaces for the drawings to exist in. The chalk ground seems to reveal a space behind the page, yet the dust sits on top of the paper creating tension between surface and illusory depth. Several of the drawings use textured paper, which allows areas of the paper to remain untouched by pencil and chalk. The repeating microdots of exposed paper sit below the drawing, making images appear semi-translucent. The regular pattern of the paper’s texture creates a lattice comparable perhaps to the grain of film and photography or a silk-screen print mesh.
Many of the drawings depict figures framed by boundaries of chalk strokes. Portraying a subject can simplify, stylise or misrepresent it, but my hope is that a drawing can become an object in it’s own right. The drawings often use negative presentation; figures without faces, features obscured by hoods or smudges of chalk; empty space that asks the viewer’s imagination to fill in the gaps. Luminous shadows and translucent colours make subjects seem like ghosts or projected holograms. Several of the drawings are based on photographs I took in department stores of mute mannequins and ecstatic displays of commodities. I find these shops depressing and fascinating; time seems distorted into a continuous present, surfaces are rich yet flat.
In previous works I often used appropriated imagery as source material, borrowing images from cinema or art history. This is in part an investigation into how a person’s identity can be shaped by cultural artefacts, how they condition our tastes and imagination - consuming us as we consume them. The predominance of mediated experiences in contemporary life leaves us wondering how much of our identity is our own?
At the rear of the gallery is a new video work, which shows a figure walking down a narrow pathway. We see this person from two camera angles, one from in front of them and one from behind. These two continuous shots are edited together frame by frame in an attempt to watch the scene simultaneously from two perspectives. This almost cancels each viewpoint out, creating instead a flickering image of a figure continually advancing and retreating in uncertain space. The persistence of vision is employed by cinema to animate still images, but in this work it superimposes images making them appear translucent whilst flattening the depth of the film frame. Like some of the drawings the video depicts an individual trapped within formal abstractions.
Duncan Marquiss (born 1979 in Aberdeenshire, Scotland) lives and works in London. Before graduating from the Glasgow School of Art in 2005, Marquiss celebrated first successes in his young career: in 2003, he exhibited at „Zenomap“ at the Scottish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. The artist currently has works on display as part of the Scottish retrospective, "Running Time, Artist Films in Scotland 1960 to Now”, at The Dean Gallery, in Edinburgh, until the end of November. Another of Marquiss’ current and ongoing projects is his participation in the LUX Associates Program in London.