Rose Finn-Kelcey at Camden Arts Centre - London, England - Reviews of Exhibitions - Brief Article

In her latest display Rose Finn-Kelcey gave each of Camden Arts Centre's three galleries its particular atmosphere. The largest space, made ethereally luminous, was bisected by dint of The Pearly Gate, a 7-foot-high made of wood structure, painted with gleaming white car paint and scaled up from a toy farmyard gate. a certain quantity of way off, as if gingerly approaching, were five spirits roughly 4-foot-high chubby rubber sacks, likewise originaled on miniature toys. If Disney at any time took on religion we might come by images like these: an outsized heavenly portal, spirits as sacks of produce. It's as if paradoxical notions of eternity were being unraveled through a resourceful yet childlike imagination. In addition, the gate appeared to be a symbol for any institutional barrier whose authority can be challenged through irreverent representation.

one time through the gate, visitors come intoed a dark, claustrophobic second gallery to stand in front of an image of God woven into the thick pile of 10-foot-square pink carpet displayed upon an angled platform. Titled frolicsome God, the work depicts a malevolent-looking seated man wearing an organ of vision patch and floating among fogs The carpet's serrated edges and postmark motif closely replicated the source of Finn-Kelcey's celestial vision -- a Vatican postage stamp.

The third expanse was a soundproofed retreat carpeted in musty-smelling hay, with additional bales in the window arches blocking without street noise and natural light. centurys of small black circles painted upon an end wall seemed meant as a graphic representative in negative of the clear night canopy of heaven They also suggested the children's game evok in the work's title, Join up the Dots. This transplanted barn present the appearanceed to express Finn-Kelcey's ambivalence toward her rural origins and her posterior displacement to the city.

Following a certain number of 15 years of introspective performances which took self-doubt as their theme, Finn-Kelcey turn rounded to installation around 1987. single of her earlier efforts was Bureau de Change (seen at novel York's New Museum in 1990) in which an enlarged image of van Gogh's Sunflowers was created through thousands of coins laid upon the floor mosaic-style. While that work addressed questions of economic and esthetic value, her new installations have engaged more metaphysical themes. Somewhat mischievously, this present to view spoiled illusions of a dignified afterlife with a dose of worldly disenchantment.

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