Hermione Allsopp, Sasha Bowles, Guy Bigland, Mel Brimfield, Alastair Gordon, Andrew Grassie, Justin Hibbs, Debbie Lawson, Peter Liversidge, Gibson Martelli, Helen Maurer, Damien Meade, Marion Michell, Clare Mitten, John Richert, Joella Wheatley and Virginia Verran
Collyer Bristow presents Complicity: Artifice and Illusion, Curated by Rosalind Davis; Zeitgeist Arts Projects
“The question is not what you look at but what you see.”Henry David Thoreau
Complicity is an exhibition examining the relationship between illusion and artifice in art. It looks at the inevitable complicity between audience and artist, both integral to the game of viewing an artwork. Forging, faking, imitating, camouflaging and counterfeiting are all accepted as valid tools of the artistic process, used to create new ways of looking at the world; subverting space and place, objects, identity and image and re-imagining and questioning our perceptionsof reality in unexpected or subversive ways.
In the context of art and its reception, the viewer from the very outset plays an integral role in the complicit act of acceptingan art object’s artifice and illusion; suspending reality and disbelief. Artist and audience share a conscious desire to engage in holding the differences between art object and reality in mind simultaneously and so knowingly acknowledge the game of complicity.
“Art is a lie that makes you realise the truth, at least the truth that is given to us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies.”Picasso
View the online catalogue of the exhibition here full of art work, press release and photos.