GALLERY I & II

25 June - 30 July 2005

The Collective proudly presents Hateball, a solo exhibition by London-based artist Nathaniel Mellors. Commissioned by the Collective, the installation will feature a new sequence of film, video and sculptural works.
In Hateball, Mellors presents a tokenistic ‘global view’; an East versus West structure in which the different representative works compete with and undermine each other’s positions. The idea of abstraction as a potentially threatening force permeates this exhibition.
In the centre, the idea of political struggle is invoked through a party-political broadcast by ‘MACGOOHANSOC’, in which a 7-foot tall woman claims to be possessed by the spirit of Patrick McGoohan, and spouts a semi-fascistic dictum. The film is informed by McGoohan’s highly original 1967 T.V. series ‘The Prisoner’, but has taken on its own mutant purpose.
Entering to witness the dying thoughts of a Polish supercomputer (BrainOne), and finishing with a re-staging of the final scene from Sylvester Stallone’s original Rambo movie ‘First Blood’, Hateball further elaborates Mellors’ own brand of constructive misanthropy and offers up a vivid, idiosyncratic exploration of contemporary art’s capacity for social and political content.

PROJECT ROOM

JOANNA BRYNIARSKA

The subjects in Joanna Bryniarska's paintings are snapshots from her family's previously hidden past. Of Polish descent, Bryniarska has inherited the typical survival trait of hoarding. It is an obsession that has been born out of her quest to understand an underlying sense of displacement and search for identity that is part of the fabric of family relationships.
Featuring children, the subject matter is highly emotive and personal to Bryniarska, but the figures seem distant and dislocated from their surroundings; intriguingly in one a girl awkwardly holds a dead goose during the family holiday to Italy. The scale of the work creates an intimacy, which is partially denied by the distortion to the bewildered faces that don't quite meet your eye.