All The Wild OnesHeike Cavallo and Jan Dunning3 November - 2 December 2006
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Jan Dunning Untitled (Idea) 2006 |
In All The Wild Ones, Jan Dunning and Heike Cavallo examine the powerful influence that the wild exerts on our cultural imagination, particularly as evidenced in mythology and fairy tales with their intrinsic stories of transformation and rites of passage. The wilderness and the forest are aligned with the unconscious as sites of creativity and potency. Moving away from any modern sense of wild equating frivolity or lack of restraint, All The Wild Ones proposes that to venture into the wild is to undertake a reflective internal journey of self-discovery.
Jan Dunning uses a pinhole camera to make photographs that have an unsettling, enigmatic perspective on the “natural” world. The language of pinhole photography, with its long exposure times, infinite depth of field and idiosyncratic cameras lends a transcendental quality to the image making. Natural Histories (2004-6) is a series of remote and unnerving landscapes, which stand outside of time, culture, and society, yet feel strangely familiar. As potential settings for myth or spiritual enlightenment, they prick our unconscious memory, and speak to us of our essential selves. In other works, strange hybrid creatures involved in a process of physical change evolve before our eyes in a tangle of limbs and flesh. It is finally appropriate that many of Dunning’s landscapes do not exist in reality - they are intricately constructed models and sets, products of memory or daydream photographed in her studio. Jan Dunning trained at St Martins and has recently had solo shows in Japan (2006) Colchester and New York (2004). |
Jan Dunning Treetwister 2006 |
Heike Cavallo’s work spans drawing, painting, video and sculpture, making worlds in which the initial sweetness and playfulness is threatened. The loss of innocence, through the acquisition of knowledge, culture and artificial desires is a central theme, referencing Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s idea of the social adult as a “corrupted” version of the child. Her installation A Forest IV - a multitude of apparently disparate and disconnected images arranged as for a car boot sale - raises issues about style, continuity and representation, but unfolds through progressive reading to offer a narrative. This work relates to her Victorian display domes housing what first appear to be miniature forests but reveal, on closer inspection, seemingly displaced or lost characters within. The intimate scale invites the viewer into Cavallo’s introspective world. Heike Cavallo is a Swiss artist who trained at the Royal College. She exhibits widely in Europe and the USA.
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Heike Cavallo War Children IV |
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