Exhibition Archive

New video sculptures and projections by the renowned British artist.

Mat Collishaw fuses antique and contemporary technologies in his unique strain of moving-image sculpture, as precious as it is provocative. His jewel-like projections mounted in Victorian frames evoke a curious and dark science while a giant projection of a baby illuminated by ultraviolet light (used to inhibit intravenous drug use from public lavatories) crosses boundaries between the aesthetically seductive and the morally reprehensible.

Throughout his career Collishaw has appropriated all manner of disturbing images - pornographic images, images of suicide victims, a close-up of a head wound inflicted by an ice pick. He states :’I'm interested in the way imagery hits me subliminally. ... Whether I like it or not, there are mechanisms within us that are primed to respond to all kinds of visual material, leaving us with no real say over what we happen to find stimulating. The type of adverts to be found on television and in glossy magazines are visually designed to have a power over the mind before they can even be questioned. The dark side of my work, primarily concerns the internal mechanisms of visual imagery and how these mechanisms address the mind.’

The new work produced for this show uses materials from differing eras such as contemporary video projections within antique frames and in the past Collishaw has juxtaposed modern technology with antique photographic equipment. He explains this as an attempt ‘to make you aware of the technology, from whatever era, and how all these gadgets are an attempt to hypnotise’ The new work uses projections of elements with which we all live, such as rain, fire, plants and insects - elements that require film or video technology because they’re about very small, imperceptible movement - and places them within elegant antique frames.

Also part of the exhibition is a large scale projection of a baby, bathed in the ultraviolet light used in public conveniences to prevent drug users locating their veins. The juxtaposition of this drug culture with baby change facilities evokes ‘a highly primitive zone where small babies have protective, glowing white nappies and ultraviolet skin. It is as though they were somehow protected by the aura of customer relations - safe under a glowing light.’

Mat Collishaw live and works in London. He took part in the exhibitions Freeze (1989) and Modern Medicine (1990) where he exhibited reworked images from medical textbooks and books on criminology. Since then, Collishaw has exhibited world-wide, presenting photographic works that combine antique and contemporary forms of moving image devices. His 1996 series of computer manipulated images of diseased flesh, reworked as the petals of exotic flowers, heralds the increasing use of digital imaging techniques culminating in Collishaw's solo-show at the Lisson Gallery where he exhibited an animation of a night-club stripper morphed together from photographic stills.