Exhibition, After Party

Forman’s Smokehouse Gallery is pleased to present a group show exploring the legacy of trickster mythology on culture. 15 young and emerging international artists contemplate and investigate Trickster in a dynamic exhibition featuring morphological creatures, fantastics worlds, responses to mythology and its inherent relationship with human perception.

Imagination and implicit states of being feature in much of the artists' work. Chris Land questions the ontology of trickster emergences, exploring mythical relations such as the Bermuda Triangle as figments of the imagination to explain unsolved mysteries and phenomena. Laura Clarke’s work explores how the subconscious is brought to the fore, concerning herself with the uncanny and the departure from the human being in images and scultures of morphological creatures and beastialities. Arina Orlova concerns herself with prominent idolised figures in contemporary culture and explores the narrative of myth and its role in cycles of human relationship to the world of mass media. Andrea Greenwood explores the idea of the carnival as a mask for democracy and the 'establishment', by incorporating installational pieces into the fabric of the buildings interior structures. Patricia Delgado's makes cycles of human activity and the pursuit of love as absurd and comic the subject in the video His and Hers, recording the experiences of two lovers journeys without a destination. Erik Bendix's conceptual paintings ridicule and make fun out of the world of culture and presents a cynical and sinister dialogue between cartoons and political structures. Other artists we are proud to be exhibiting such Olenna Mokliak, Elizabeth Vicary, Katie Brookes, Ulrika Bygge and Sepideh Saii create fantastic worlds of blurred visions between fantasy and reality, person and myth, in paintings, print making, video, drawing, photography, textiles and installation.

Trickster will be explored as a cabinet of wonders in this forthcoming show, unraveling as a journey through the many guises the trickster can present itself as, to the public and personal eye. The exhibition studies work such as Mikhail Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World, Paul Radin’s Trickster and Lewis Hyde's Trickster Makes This World.

Winnebago Trickster "continually violates the boundaries between nature and culture; he is part animal, part human (often a talking animal such as a crow or a coyote, or a producer such as a spider), part man and part woman (often coupling with either sex indiscriminately), and a violator of cultural taboos (often eating the food that is specific to other animal groups, or eating what should not be food at all). Yet Trickster is also a spirit of creativity and accused of violating the norms of culture. For example, at the conclusion of the Winnebago myth that forms the basis for Paul Radin’s classical study of the trickster, Trickster unleashes the Mississippi, allowing it to flood the land, and thereby making agriculture, possible".

Artists: Laura Clarke/ Erik Bendix/ Andrea Greenwood/ Aleteia Daneluz/ Arina Orlova/ Olenna Mokliak/ Elizabeth Vicary/ Patricia Delgado/ Kristen Lovelock/ Sepideh Saii/ Chris Land/ Katie Brookes/ Hector La Box/ Ulrika Bygge/ Gyeong Yoon An. The show's curator is David Marchant

Forman's Smokehouse Gallery was founded in 2010 by Lance Forman and William Chamberlain. The progression of its exhibtion programme is expanding this month with an in-house exhibition curator for the first time.

Formans Restaurant will be open during the private view and at all times during the show.