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Latest items? Unedited? Fringe Report Uncut
Exhibition -
What You'd Expect
Verdict: Subverting Reality
UK Tour - Dec 04 - Aug 05
Peter Liversidge amazes, amuses and confuses with his view of the world. Designer- labels and corporate logos become child-like copies of themselves. Expensive, iconic photographic equipment is transmuted into a Blue Peter sticky-back-plastic shadow of itself. His work continually surprises and subverts. Returning to the real world is to find it a slightly different place.
Peter Liversidge has his own awkward and naive way of working that replaces the value of the original. His interpretations of popular culture and media images are recreated with the technical skill of a primary-school child.
A Leica M6 camera, Cartier gold brooch and Hertz hire-car keys are made with card, glue, plastic, rubber, cotton wood and paint. Mobile phones, bank-cards and rolls of film lose their smooth, shiny corporate identity - becoming both the same and different.
Logos, that immediately identify their brand Ferrari horse, Michelin Man, Vodaphone trademark, and many more - are reworked. They become recognisable, but no longer the same.
Another gallery targets a heroic theme the Olympic Games. Enormous black and white posters celebrate the emblems of Sarajevo, Innsbruck, Tokyo and Barcelona. They surround a bronze of Olympic rings not quite smooth, not quite round and not very big. This artists hymn to the Olympiad is set to a distinctly different tune.
A third gallery examines The Last Frontier the American West specifically the North Montana Plains. Here are massive fake boulders of paper and card. They create a landscape, captured inside a room, divided by fences of found wood, and littered with animal carcasses of MDF and emulsion paint. They are surrounded by watercolours, on which the dots in the distance may be elk migrating - or perhaps just dots. Cowboy films will never be the same.
A strange and absurd video is projected on three walls of the final gallery. Three small mechanical Victorian toy bears appear as life-size. One crawls, but does not get anywhere. The others move pointlessly, with a pot and a stick. They are at times funny, frustrating, grotesque or threatening. The film loop is a fragile illusion which elides grandeur.
Credits: Artist - Peter Liversidge. What You'd Expect is a touring project organised by: Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art, Herbert Read Gallery, Kent Institute of Art and Design, The Grundy Art Gallery,
Blackpool and Ikon, Birmingham. Supported by Arts Council England. The artist is represented by Paul Stolper Gallery, London.
END
(c) Peter Andrews 2005
reviewed 3 December 04 / Sunderland
Fringe Report (c) Fringe Report 2002-2012
www.fringereport.com
