Alex Hartley: Waiting for Daylight to End, 2011
Alex Hartley’s exhibition ‘The World is Still Big’ opened at Victoria Miro back in November (I have only just managed to see it before it closes next week). The show consists of a number of large scale mixed media works. On first sight these look like like photographs, but they are in fact sculptures.
Hartley has incorporated architectural models into each work – for example the huts in the two images above and below are actually constructed out of wood and potrude out of the photograph towards the viewer. Unfortunately seeing these works as 2D images really don’t do them justice. When you view them in the flesh you can see all the intricate and painstaking detail which has gone into each piece. He describes these scenes as representing …”one moment and what I end up building into them is a back-story to that moment usually about failure: a man trying to inhabit wildernesses, a man trying to inhabit these Utopian dreams gone wrong.”
Alex Hartley; Clearing, 2011
In the courtyard of the gallery the artist has constructed a dome (complete with wood burner and pet chickens) which he has been living in for the duration of the show. (This dome was inspired by the 1960s Colorado hippie commune ‘Drop City’ – hence the name of the work ‘Dropper’) The exhibition raises a number of issues such as community, belonging and isolation, and counter culture versus establishment.
Alex Hartley: Dropper, 2011 (installed in the courtyard of Victoria Miro Gallery)
The World is Still Big at the Victoria Miro Gallery runs until 21st January, 2012
