Together in electric dreams @ Riflemaker – London

Next Monday evening will mark the opening of Stuart Pearson Wright’s second solo exhibition @ one of our favorite London galleries: Riflemaker (we don’t say that about every single one ok?).

As one of the youngest winners of the BP Portrait award (back in 2001 when he was only 26) Stuart’s new works emphasize the artist’s concern with the motif of the smile and its traditional role in the history of portraiture as well as its use in advertising, popular culture and the mass media as a signifier of a successful life.

His work explores the process of transformation which takes place both privately and publicly when a camera is pointed at a subject and what the artist describes as “the collective, hysterical conspiracy to appear happy which blights our visual world with endless images of disingenuousness”.

Do we really all pretend to be happy when someone points a camera at us? Apparently so, as Wright argues that our smile has evolved to convey an unfortunate sense of fakeness and insincerity.

 The exhibition also includes a sub-series of tattoo-portraits (our initial idea when seeing the flyer). The subjects of these paintings were sought out by the artist and chosen for the way in which they represent a number of pre-existing old-school archetypes such as the strongman, the tattooed lady, the Coney Island freak-show performer and the rockabilly hepcat.

See? There’s also room for some real fun! And next Monday from 6-9 you’re all invited for a great freak show, the following for a conversation between Fiona Shaw and the artist himself, and if not… well… you have until Feb 15th to make up your mind.