Press Release
Other Criteria proudly exhibits new works by Mat Collishaw, including a delicate edition of glass water pipes and a series of digital transfer prints on goatskin parchment, extending Collishaw’s previous series titled ‘Last Meal on Death Row’. Also on display will be photogravure etchings from the artist’s Insecticide series.
Collishaw’s glass sculptures, the ‘Innercity Inhalers’, are replicas of plastic smoking bongs used by improvising hedonists the world over. Debased interpretations of Marcel Duchamp’s ‘Air de Paris’, these works address the polluting, but also mind expanding effects of inner city air. One does not have to light the bong in order to get the desired effect—the visual distortion taking place when looking through the translucently coloured and partially melted bongs is a sensation not dissimilar to the perceptual disorientation of the drug smoker.
The ‘Last Meal on Death Row’ prints depict carefully arranged still-lives of the meals chosen by American death row prisoners on the last day before their execution.
For the series, Collishaw restated a number of—often intriguing—last suppers and arranged them in the style of 17th century Vanitas paintings, a manner traditionally used to reflect on the transience of life, the futility of pleasure, and the certainty of death.
Whilst aesthetically pleasing in the most classical sense, these photographs reveal below the surface a shocking confrontation with the imminence of death, and give insight into the desires and fears of the to be executed. Humble and mundane foods like cheeseburgers or ice cream take on a new poignancy, as the pictures become surrogate portraits of the prisoners.
The multi-layered yet subtle way in which the message is conveyed is characteristic for Collishaw’s oeuvre.
Collishaw’s glass sculptures, the ‘Innercity Inhalers’, are replicas of plastic smoking bongs used by improvising hedonists the world over. Debased interpretations of Marcel Duchamp’s ‘Air de Paris’, these works address the polluting, but also mind expanding effects of inner city air. One does not have to light the bong in order to get the desired effect—the visual distortion taking place when looking through the translucently coloured and partially melted bongs is a sensation not dissimilar to the perceptual disorientation of the drug smoker.
The ‘Last Meal on Death Row’ prints depict carefully arranged still-lives of the meals chosen by American death row prisoners on the last day before their execution.
For the series, Collishaw restated a number of—often intriguing—last suppers and arranged them in the style of 17th century Vanitas paintings, a manner traditionally used to reflect on the transience of life, the futility of pleasure, and the certainty of death.
Whilst aesthetically pleasing in the most classical sense, these photographs reveal below the surface a shocking confrontation with the imminence of death, and give insight into the desires and fears of the to be executed. Humble and mundane foods like cheeseburgers or ice cream take on a new poignancy, as the pictures become surrogate portraits of the prisoners.
The multi-layered yet subtle way in which the message is conveyed is characteristic for Collishaw’s oeuvre.
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