GED QUINN
MY GREAT UNHAPPINESS GIVES ME A RIGHT TO YOUR BENEVOLENCE
22 November 2007 - 13 January 2008
In 1793 Charlotte Corday stabbed to death the French revolutionary Jean-Paul
Marat in his bath. The image is famously depicted in Jacques-Louis David's
painting of the same year. The exhibition's title is a translation of
the script of the supposed note sent by Corday and held by the dead Marat
as depicted by David. The duality of the message, at once supplicatory and
demanding, requesting assistance and promising destruction is echoed
in the works; a discourse of threat permeating the familiar and pleasing.
Quinn's new work shows
irreverent use of diffuse and destabilising imagery and referentiality
to both undercut and play with the discourse of threat. Rich landscapes
into which Quinn takes signs of death, suffering, redemption and humour.
An inimitable mix of revelation and obfuscation, of densely referential
imagery. In 'Here is not the Place for Nostalgia' the remains of a nondescript
functional building sits abandoned and swamped in water - permeating
decay into the vast landscape of Jasper Francis Cropsey (1823-1900 The
American Sublime). Layers of drawings and markings on the walls and references
to movements of the past, such as the first Dada exhibition (Pig in Army
Uniform) or The Enlightenment where descriptions of The Grotesque were
visualized (a two headed figure drawn on wall) all suggest the passing of
time. Glowing Orbs circle, hinting at the supernatural; a ghostly presence
- while a wheelclamped Time Machine remains imprisoned in the present and
prevented from moving back or forward in time. In 'No one here has heard
of you', an imagined 17th Century Dutch flower painting, Quinn plays deliberately
and ironically with the heavy symbolism of the genre. The vase is placed
within a room - imagined scenes of the construction of the Tower of Babel
can be seen through the window. The room is at the top of the tower that,
the book of Genesis and apocrypha inform us, was built by a united humanity
to reach the heavens. The vase has an image from The Exorcist (1973)
where a struggle between good and evil is acted out while within the
beautifully worked floral arrangement a skull is represented in Archimbaldesque
style. In 'The Lone Ranger' Quinn has taken Ruisdael intervened with Robert
Smithson's 'Partially Buried Woodshed' ironically floating with Angel
wings above the bleak moonlit winter landscape as if resurrected. Large
billowing clouds and black smoke hover menacingly over the dead tree and
derelict buildings, where depictions of Earth, Fire, Air and Water are seen
within the rooms. A lone figure in prison uniform (with dog) walks through
landscape carrying a bird table. 'The Great Art of Light and Shadow' takes
as its backdrop Ruisdael's 'The Jewish Cemetery' (c.1679) [The Detroit version]
albeit reversed, as though seen in a mirror. Like Ruisdael's work, highly
charged with allegorical intent, Quinn works with a modern narrative
overlaid and impregnated into the 17th century painting by using imagery
of Andreas Baader's Stammheim cell of 1977 where the social activist turned
terrorist was "found" dead. Quinn plays further by having the prison cell
scene depicted through a Camera Obscura therefore suggesting something reflected
from outside the picture plane.
References to esoteric
hierarchies of the angels, elemental powers, entropy, sex, American presidents
and psychedelic album covers are all used to wider meaning in Quinn's
work creating a world where the esoteric and banal, archaic and modern
symbols of Western culture and subculture coexist.