Semiotic Guerrilla Warfare Part III, Dean Clough Gallery, Halifax

Top right to centre: Works on paper by Jenny Steele, Simon Woolham, Hilde Krohn Huse and Monica Ursina Jager.

30 January - 24 April 2016

The Link Gallery

Dean Clough, Halifax, HX3 5AX

Open Daily 9am - 5pm

Dean Clough Galleries in collaboration with PAPER & CHARLIE SMITH LONDON present:

Semiotic Guerrilla Warfare (part III)

Hermione Allsopp / Jemima Brown / Andrea Cotton / Lisa Denyer / Frances Disley / Tracey Eastham / Zavier Ellis / Sarah Eyre / David Hancock / Florian Heinke / Phill Hopkins / Hilde Krohn Huse / Sam Jackson / Monica Ursina Jäger / Vincent James / Chris Jones / Simon Leahy Clark / Richard Meaghan / James Moore / Alex Gene Morrison / Narbi Price / Conor Rogers / Mitra Saboury / Jenny Steele / Pär Strömberg / Zhu Tian / Lisa Wilkens / Simon Woolham / Hannah Wooll / Rachel Wrigley / THE CULT OF RAMM:ΣLL:ZΣΣ featuring Yang Younghee

Semiotic Guerilla Warfare marks a new collaboration between CHARLIE SMITH LONDON and PAPER presented in The Link Gallery at Dean Clough. The artists assembled create artwork from any materials that come to hand; creating a theoretical collage of themes: linguistics, text, the city, psychogeography, found images, appropriation, youth / underground culture, networks, cults / rituals. Exploring popular culture in an attempt to de-value the art object and elevate everyday objects. Semiotic Guerrilla Warfare presents found objects, mass-produced materials, and a lo-fi aesthetics to create a new visual language that comments upon the disposable nature of our culture and society.

The purchase of commodities can be seen to offer a sense of freedom and an escape. By manipulating and appropriating high street fashions youth subcultures create a unique identity and transform themselves into street art. These concepts might be equally applied to artists, who use appropriation in their art to subvert the meaning of the subjects that they transform. This creative use of commodities is exploited for the purpose of resistance, altering the meaning of a chosen mass produced object through the concept of bricolage. This cultural appropriation or theft and transformation of a commodity highlights each of these artists as conspicuous consumers. Dick Hebdige, the subcultural theorist, quoting Umberto Eco, describes these subversive practices as “semiotic guerrilla warfare”; raiding the dominant culture for their trophies. These commodities are desired simply because they are status symbols of the privileged. They are essentially “empty fetishes”, desired and appropriated from those that are their antithesis. These artists essentially adopt the lifestyles they appropriate, employing their visual language to subvert the meaning of the very images they incorporate into their work.

The exhibition contains individual works from internationally renowned artists such as Chris Jones, Jemima Brown, Florian Heinke, Phill Hopkins, and John Moore’s prizewinner, Narbi Price. Alongside these, there is a series of portraits of Black Metal Girls by Swedish artist, Pär Strömberg. These young women, mainly girls from catholic backgrounds, use the machoistic iconography of Black Metal to make a statement; claiming the subculture as their own. In portraying their ‘selfies’ in Watercolour, Strömberg hopes to evaluate their status within the tropes of Romanticism. The avant-garde cyber Hip Hop performance art group, The Cult of RAMM:ΣLL:ZΣΣ, present , a residue recording the Cults’ live street performance rituals. Alongside these, will be a new series of intricate sculptural works by Tracey Eastham. Presented in bell jars, Eastham cuts exquisite detail in suspended fine gold paper.

The Settlers, Screen-print on Fabriano, 2014