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MAT COLLISHAW Analix Forever - Art & Public - Mandarin Oriental Hôtel - Mat Collishaw Museum Geneva, May 4th - August 2004 www.collishaw-genevaevent.com For the first time in Switzerland, over the period of several months, public and private spaces will be showing simultaneously works by the English artist Mat Collishaw. The aim of this event (www.collishaw-genevaevent.com) is to let art lovers and collectors appreciate the eclectic range and evolution of Collishaw's art (photos, installations, drawings, video projections) from the early years of his career to his latest video installations created especially for this occasion. Ancient legends depicting the attraction between beauty and evil/damnation, love and death, the blessed and the cursed are usually found as references in Collishaw's art - his pieces on Jesus Christ (Shaking Jesus, 2003) and Ophelia (Cyrille, 2001) respectively) being strong examples of this. For his new shows in Geneva, W.M.Egley's painting The Lady of Shalott and A. Tennyson' poem holding the same title nourished his inspiration. In Tennyson' poem, with its hypnotic rhythm and repetition, the Lady is imprisoned on an island, forbidden to look directly at the world, watching only through a mirror whose reflection she weaves into a tapestry web. Solitary and mysteriously accursed, she dreams of her own loyal knight and confesses herself «sick of the shadows», yearning for real experiences. So when the shining image of Lancelot, the red cross knight, appears in her mirror, she suddenly breaks the ban. In this moment of disobedience to the curse, she leaves the room and condemns herself to die. In his reinterpretation and modernisation of this poem, Collishaw re-articulates one of the dilemmas of art, caught between reflection and reality, and plays with the ambivalence of the metaphor of transformation from the world of shadows to that of substance and ultimately to death. The themes of confinement and bondage, illusion-delusion, the perpetual ambiguity of closed spaces whether dungeons, wardrobes or cages - are favourite themes explored by Collishaw and will be found again in the new video projections presented in Geneva in May. The cruelty of
imprisonment and suffocation, the desire and the anxiety to control, the fascination for submissive beauty and its ephemeral power will overflow Geneva these coming months. DETAILS OF THE EVENT: Analix Forever
www.artnet.com/analix-forever.html
25 rue de l'Arquebuse, 1204 Geneva
+41 22 329 17 09
exhibition form May 4th to the end of August Art & Public - Cabinet PH
www.artnet.com/artpublic.html
37 rue des Bains, 1205 Geneva
+41 22 781 46 66
exhibition from May 4th to May 22nd Mandarin Oriental Hôtel du Rhône
1 Quai Turrettini, 1201 Geneva
+41 22 909 00 00
exhibition from May 4th to the end of August "Mat Collishaw Museum"
12 Place du Grand Mézel, 1204 Geneva
+41 79 200 90 36
exhibition from May 4th to the end of august
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