We are pleased to present Intruder Alert, an exhibition of photography by Nigel Grimmer and Liane Lang, two artists who make intrusions into the personal space of well-known artworks in playful, theatrical, and seductive ways.
Nigel Grimmer’s portraits play with the divas of decorative art, whereby classic kitsch images are turned into masks as part of carefully constructed compositions. Part of Nigel’s focus is on pop culture, and the processes whereby artworks that were once commonplace, and then discarded as old hat, becomes rediscovered and reinvented as a badge of taste and difference. He uses these motifs to replace the faces of his subjects in a way that blurs the division between famous image, painted object, and costumed person. The photographs fragment into several incongruous layers which still gel together to create an illusion of a character. Disarmingly fun, Nigel’s works are anchored in complex ideas of how taste in artworks can form both part of an identity and also part of a disguise.
Liane Lang’s works look at the legacy of Classical civilisation, presenting images of iconic sculptures such as The Dying Gaul and the Laocoön being subtly and sensually interfered with. Amidst sweeps of marble flesh, unexpected arms and legs thread themselves between the limbs of the ancients, exploring their sculpted bodies and caressing their pumiced skin. These belong to the mannequins that Liane intertwines with the sculptures, synthetic dolls that seem to come to life and discover a human sensuality. By depicting a physical intimacy with these heavyweight relics of antiquity, Liane recreates a sense of that peculiarly personal relationship that we can develop with a work of art – as if her dolls represented the passions of an imagination left to run riot with an unattainably ideal object.
