EXHIBITIONS / IT'S HAPPENING AGAIN

02.12.2004 to 12.12.2004

Alex Lawler, Anna Kristensen - It's Happening Again

It's Happening Again brings together the work of two artists who rely on nostalgic references in their painting. When examining nostalgia the viewer is blocked in their attempt to truly comprehend a re-presentation of the past, through their knowledge of the present. The artists play with this aspect of nostalgia which essentially pushes the viewer back, but also indulge in the pure aesthetic satisfaction of particular nostalgic imagery. 

Anna Kristensen utilizes nostalgia in The Textbook Series as an area in which to marry the high art of classical landscape painting with cheap kitsch. Strong connections are maintained between photographic, printing and painting processes. Page layouts, including picture, margin and caption, of 60's and 70's children's encyclopaedias are reproduced by hand, parodying the plein-air tradition of landscape painting.

In the case of Alex Lawler, nostalgia is present in the references to psychedelia. The repetition of cells, with its irregularity, is intended to induce disorientation, mimicking the euphoria-to-despair chronology of psychedelic states of mind. The candy coloured repetitions of Pop hysteria cycle in and out of fashion in contemporary art, nostalgic grapplings between the present and the past.

As artists, to delve into the folds of culture that constitute nostalgia and kitsch, we forego the opportunity of claiming a singularity of expression through visual means, of identifying oneself as being in a position of originality. Arguably however this is the nature of any image, nothing can be unmediated and no expression original or singular.

So if it happens again we can be safe in the knowledge that this is the nature of all things, what we see now, will inevitably be represented later, as time brings us back, face to face to the recycled past as present - then to recycled present as future.