Deleted: I remember seeing ventriloquists when I was younger. There is something shocking and fascinating in how our brains and minds can join in and help the illusionist work their magic on us. A lump of painted wood animated into life before us. We are deceived because we want to be deceived. As we grow older we tell ourselves that we aren’t so easily fooled – but we are. We are constantly hooked into the fantasies spun for us by actors both commercial and political. A great concept to base an art show around then.
This group show will explore the idea of ‘Ventriloquism’ both directly and indirectly, drawing upon topical thematics including data profiling, hyperreality, forgotten histories, misinformation, gaslighting, mediation, and artificial intelligence.
The artists selected traverse a breadth of media and methods, from the traditional; painting, drawing, print and sculpture, to lens-based, digital, contemporary performance and conceptual practices.
They also span demographics from recent graduate, mid career to established international practitioners.
The works, artists and artwork seek to resonate and draw out critical, playful and insightful narratives with the collection at the Whitaker, both with the physicality of the Museum layout, on display and through archived collections.
It aims to raise an informed debate around how information is both mediated to us by both the marketing & political forces via algorithms and how these act or speak on our behalf.
Featuring over twenty five artists including several collaborations with Mike Chavez-Dawson such as AI, Rebecca Davy, Brian Reed, Dave Beech, Louise Adkins with Jon Purcell, Chris Alton, Axel Bottenberg, Julie Cassels, Jane Chavez-Dawson, Hilary Jack, Chris Leach, Nye Thompson, Brass Art, Jeffrey Knopf, Karen Densham, Alan Baker, Pat Flynn, David Alker with Peter Liddell, David Gledhill, Jake & Dinos Chapman (from TCDFC*), Sarah Hardacre, Richard Shields, Keiran Leech, Liam Scully, Paul Vivian, and Evita Ziemele.
David Alker is showing a group of paintings called the wax BEATLES in the Ventriloquism exhibition at The Whitaker. The well-known group members look somehow distorted, frozen but about to burst into life as joyful, grotesque versions of the fab four.
“I have been making these over the last 4 years. The original idea came out of an interest in museums and collections and the ways in which we are encouraged to engage with them. The original Madame Tussauds opened in 1835 in London, and the wax museum is a particular kind of place where the collection is a collection of celebrities. We can meet them and share their space – with all that entails: the smell of the Chamber of Horrors, the anger and physicality of The Hulk and the endless walking of The Beatles across the zebra crossing on Abbey Road.”
“Waxworks and ventriloquists’ dummies have their own cultural history and mythology which I wanted to work with. This comes from films like House of Wax, The Night of the Museums or Dead of Night. In these scenarios, ‘life-likeness’ is at a premium and it is best not to get too close to the uncanny animated model sitting in the corner of the room.”
“So, this led me to this group of paintings in which I wanted to recreate the waxwork-like quality through the medium of a painted portrait. As the sculptor Professor Henry Jarrod says in the 1953 version of the film House of Wax:
People say they can see my Marie Antoinette breathe; that her breast rises and falls. Look at her eyes. They follow you wherever you go.”
Preview / Opening: 24 Aug 2024, 14:00 to 16:00
VENTRILOQUISM: The Lost Voice Spoken by Others… is on until 10 Nov 2024
The Whitaker Art Gallery & Museum, Rawtenstall, Rossendale. BB4 6RE.
The exhibition has been kindly supported by: Rogue Artists’ Studios, Selfish, and Neal’s Yard Health Remedies
*The Chavez-Dawson Family Collection
