Residency phase begins
From 20th January - 16th February 2011 the artists Dutton and Swindells will be ‘in residence’ at PSL creating new works and points of resonance between existing works to create ‘The Stag and Hound’, the latest installment of the artists ‘Institute of Beasts’ project - a project designed to temporarily house what the artists’ describe as their more errant or wild thoughts.
Altering and shifting over the course of 3 and a half weeks, the exhibition will include objects, texts, animations and sound works which form an installation, both elegant and disturbing, that encodes a wide range of references.
Stemming from the idea of an institute being something ordered and organised whereas ‘Beasts’ are unknown, erratic and mythologised, Dutton and Swindells divide their institute into conceptual departments, imposing a kind of idiosyncratic order, a gesture perhaps toward taming the erratic.
Animated geometric forms and texts sit alongside inverted flower photographs, wall-drawings refer to celestial alignments, sound and music works are built by graphically re-interpreting activist slogans, a computer reads a pathetic and confessional soliloquy and a wall text appropriates spam e-mails selling ‘Viagra’.
The project has evolved into a multi-layered collage in which inconclusiveness and doubt are prioritized over empirical certainties, forming the critical sentiment which lies at the heart of the project. ‘The Institute of Beasts’ creates its own strange, yet strategic world view with its chaotic aesthetic and sceptical notions of knowledge or knowing.
The title of the residency and exhibition references a tapestry ‘The Stag Hunt’ housed at the Cluny Museum in Paris in which the stag represents everyman and is hounded by dogs which represent the pitfalls in life such as desire, age or illness. Following on from previous instalments of the Institute project such as ‘The Dog and Duck’ at the Kookmin Art Gallery, Seoul, S.Korea, the title of the show at PSL could also be the name of a pub, suggesting a space of potential conviviality but also of unexpected encounters.
