Iain Cheesman

Contact

30 March - 17 April

Contact by Iain Cheesman deals with issues around power in the form of a reference to childlike fantasies of prowess in war. Resonating with nostalgia and heroic deeds it is also firmly grounded in the domestic by Cheesman’s choices of medium (model bi-planes of the Biggles era are pushily quilted in pink and lace). Contact is (perhaps) an obsession with war and how it is presented in a detached way in our media, we are the observers who empathize from afar, we are impressed with the technology and in a surreal way we disconnect the link to the organic form of the human, bodies disappear under blankets, rubble or an eyelid of evil. Just as a schoolboy would plat ‘at-war’ on the lounge room carpet, Contact intends to play within the gallery. Contact appears under the guise of a domestic situation, it is harmless, it has a feminine edge, (literally of lace) and you can almost hear a mothers words… “It is a release of pent up obsessions”!

In Contact, we become the boy, we are the allies (as usual) not the axis, the ‘good guys’ and the hero’s/heroin’s, but be aware we may live or die in battle.