Peter Kennard and Cat Picton-PhillippsObscenity
16 December 2006 to 21 January 2007 V22 Dalston
This exhibition brings together for the first time the collaborative work made about Iraq by Peter Kennard and Cat Picton-Phillipps 2003-2006. During this time they have pummeled and bashed the photographs coming back from Iraq with paint, charcoal, dirt and newsprint, using a multiplicity of materials to portray the horror unleashed. As the violence in Iraq escalated, they moved on to make large-scale work in an attempt to make history paintings of the ongoing occupation, combining digital photomontage and paint on long scroll-like canvases stapled, unstretched, to the wall. In this series of workUntitled (Iraq)images of the Allied control rooms and the paraphernalia of war are visually locked together with the resulting carnage.
Kennard and Phillipps have said of their most recent work:
“The madness, rapaciousness and greed of the Bush Blair axis is impossible to picture but we try to create a dialogue with the pictorial results of their obscene actions and our work becomes more, more splintered, rough and smashed in response to the results of their criminality. The materials we make the work in become more dominant, the neat frames used in our first work are rejected, the canvas we then used is rejected, now we work on thin paper and newspaper, transient materials whose fragility is aligned with the oppressed people represented in the work. In our latest work the images of Iraqi civilians become more immaterial as if the people themselves are dissolving into the paper on which they are represented. The surface is pockmarked, torn, attacked, the work looks unfinished, the violence unleashed by this war has no end in sight.”
Venue info
V22 Dalston
10–16 Ashwin Street
Dalston
London
E8 3DL
Overground: Dalston Junction, Dalston Kingsland
Bus: 30, 38, 56, 67, 76, 149, 236, 242, 243, 277