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till December 16th, 2006

We are very pleased to announce the first collaborative show of the emerging artists Lucy Skaer & Anita Di Bianco at our gallery!

Minor Characters combines the artwork of two artists whose main common characteristics lie in their imaginative use of appropriation: Minor Characters is an ensemble of found or re-arranged narratives, concerning itself more with re-telling known, passed around, repeated stories than with making grandiose claims to originality.(Di Bianco)

Lucy Skaer, who was born 1975 in Cambridge, lives and works in Glasgow. At the present she is artist in residence in New York (Scottish Arts Council). She gratuated at the Glasgow School of Art IN 1997 WITH A BA IN FINE ART. She is also a founder member of the artists' collaborative group ARTISTS' COLLABORATIVE GROUP Henry's VIII Wives. Lucy Skaer uses various artistic media such as drawing, video, sculpture and photography. Minor Characters offers an insight into her multifaceted work: Skaer presents a short film (16mm film converted to DVD digital format, 2006) which shows the hands of the 89 year old novelist and surrealist painter Leonora Carrington, Cherry wood sculptures (2006), which are based on photographic scenes of riots, an antique oak table inlaid with a mother of pearl shadow, as if cast by an imagined sitter, as well as a life size drawing of a whale skeleton, depicted in a mass of tiny spiral like marks. By starting from different points of origin, Lucy Skaer explores aspects of artistic expression and rearticulates contents and substance of the appropriated images.

Anita Di Bianco is a film and video artist living in New York, where she was born in 1970. She received her education at the Rutgers University in New Jersey and was artist in residence at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam from 2000 until 2001. Her short films take up, modify and re-work existing and re-imagined literary and film characters excerpting and adapting the texts of such authors as Jean Genet, Marguerite Yourcenar, and Gertrude Stein, as well as revisiting familiar media rituals and pop-cultural tropes.

Among her disparate sources are Academy Awards speeches, international newspapers and oft-quoted scenes from such films as Scorseses Taxi Driver.

In addition to her latest work THE DEAD SOULS SCANDAL (16mm film, 2006), which is based on an excerpt of Heinrich Böll's Gruppenbild mit Dame, Di Bianco shows her 50-minute adaptation Disaffection and Disaffectation (Digital Video, 2003), in which she takes up Jean Genets postwar play Les Bonnes (debut performance 1949). The artist interferes with the story by reducing the characters in the play from three to two, concentrating and altering the clutter of conflicts, sympathy and power relations.

The exhibition Minor Characters traces narrative relations between the fictional and real characters of the component works and from the density of realms from which they are drawn from the infamous young maids of Genets Les Bonnes, to the surrealist writer/painter Leonora Carrington, to the literary tax auditor in Heinrich Bölls Gruppenbild mit Dame. [...] These works confess to and pursue an un-momentous specificity and varied circumstance, brought together by an insistence on detail, an insistence on the importance of numerous and utterly divergent legacies. (Di Bianco)