3 Exhibitions at Firstdraft
Personal, sexual and artistic identities are explored through representations of place in three shows, by Helena Leslie, Paul Williams and Drew Pettifer.
Overview
Drew Pettifer casts his friends in photographed re-enactments of scenes from amateur pornography in the countryside where he grew up in this series called Hold onto your friends. The Castle Project is Helena Leslie's delicately drawn and dreamily distorted representation of her experience of anticipating and experiencing and reconsidering a travel plan to Leslie Castle, and an unpacking of the identity of this building throughout its history. Paul Williams' Confetti Solution sees the paintings he's deemed unsuccessful cut into shapes and either scattered across the floor or suspended in swinging open containers as though ready to be distributed.
What these three shows have in common is a reclamation of place and an assertion of identity through artistic technique. Leslie's drawings of her ancestral castle as a childhood dream - a site for a potential fairy-tale and a literally bogged-down and for the most part deserted contemporary reality - is a working through of ideas about heritage and history, their tininess implying both critical distance and the idea of the 'faraway' both conceptually and in terms of place. The sites in which Pettifer has pictured his friends are closer to home but equally as transformed. By the interpolation of scenes and figures, settings he identifies as "formerly oppressive" become scenes of queer sexual desire. As to Williams' confetti, they're landscapes that became paintings that became failures - the nature of his practice determining when he makes that call - that he cuts up and displays to make a landscape of a very different sort.
Image: Untitled, Drew Pettifer, 2011
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