I'll Be Your Mirror @ Independents Biennial Liverpool 06

Jemima & Dolly Brown
Gordon Cheung
Leo Fitzmaurice
David Hancock
Owen Leong
Andy Magee
Rui Matsunaga
Richard Meaghan
Stuart Semple
Hannah Wooll

Dawn Woolley
Isabel Young

Exhibition Dates: - 13 September – 26 November 2006
Private View: - Saturday 16 September 12 – 4pm
Venue: - 6th Floor, Gostin Buildings, Hanover Street, Liverpool, L1 4LN

Opening Times: - Monday - saturday 10-5

Jemima and Dolly Brown

'Pinkie Brown', Mixed Media

With influences embracing 1970s interior design, the fringes of the Arts and Crafts movement and the long English tradition of 'domestic' portraiture Jemima Brown has created a new series of wall hung sculptures feature disembodied heads floating in highly detailed cameos or rosettes of discarded bed linens and plastic flowers.

Gordon Cheung

'Top 10 Dead Celebrity Earners', Mixed Media on Canvas

Gordon Cheung’s Top 10 Dead celebrity earners reflects the immortalisation of celebrities as they ascend as contemporary gods to watch over a baron dystopian landscape.

Leo Fitzmaurice

'Plastic Bag', Marker on Bag

Leo Fitzmaurice’s work revolves around his relationship to design and us the consumer. Using the logos on carrier bags and celebrity featured magazines he obscures using felt-tip markers. In doing so Fitzmaurice shows his dissatisfaction with today’s media and commercially obsessed society.

David Hancock

'I Wear Black on the Outside' part I, Acrylic on Canvas

Owen Leong

'Hole', Lamba Print

Owen Leong explores Europe’s colonial past. Leong’s work grapples with an urgency to move beyond structures that bind notions of identity to our bodies. Dressed in full 18th Century regalia, he creates a surrealist fantasy that explores how the body is physically, socially and culturally framed

Andrew Magee

'I Want to be the Wind', Oil on Canvas

Andy Magee paints portraits of Geishas surrounded by an illusory world of motifs that encapsulate a sense of another culture. The work presents a juxtaposition that evokes a sense of not belonging. The paintings explore ideas of cultural authenticity in a world where the validity of culture has been deregulated through globalisation.

Rui Matsunaga

'Untitled', Oil on Canvas

Rui Matsunaga creates fantasy worlds that look towards a utopian existence. By manipulating pop culture imagery she renders mutated being sampled genetically.

Richard Meaghan

'The Frog Adventure', Acrylic on Canvas

Richard Meaghan’s use of portraiture is not detached from the emotionally laden and personal, but encompasses these experiences often nostalgic or sentimental within the context of memory and his relationship with his partner and step-daughter.

Stuart Semple

'Your Skin Makes Me Cry', Mixed Media

Stuart Semple scours the media for images using the media manipulation of the celebrity back on its self, creating his own Warhol like persona, essentially commenting upon the shallowness of contemporary society

Hannah Wooll

'By the Light', Oil on Canvas

Hannah Wooll creates a fantastical environment populated by partially formed creatures, part super model, part fetishistic sex doll, writhing in a HG Wells’ like vision of the future.

Dawn Woolley

'Teaser', Lambda Print

Dawn Woolley explores photography and its convoluted relationship with reality. The disparity between the ego, alter ego and the ego ideal of the central character is a major focus of the work, as is the construction of ‘self’. She depicts her body as a medium through which she comments on self/identity and social analysis.

Isabel Young

'Nero, 1588-1604', Oil on Linen

Isabel Young focuses on the overlooked, elevating their status and constructing an intimate relationship between artist and sitter. Her work discusses the often clumsy integration of animals into society, and can be both seen as a lasting memorial to their temporal lives, and the conflict between nature and civilisation.

I'll Be Your Mirror - Statement

For the 2006 Liverpool Independent Biennial , David Hancock and Richard Meaghan intend to put together an exhibition that invigorates the idea of portraiture in the 21st Century. The artists selected will explore the historical significance of portraiture as a way of defining our times. Portraiture is an arts historical legacy, giving us a valuable insight into the figures that populated particular periods. A good portrait gives a sense of personality and allows us to empathise with someone lost to time, yet it seems in the past the genre has mostly focussed upon the great and the good. In this exhibition the artists aim to focus upon society as a whole, from the celebrity to the disparate, from those neglected in the past to those who haunt the realms of the imagination.

As a port, Liverpool was a gateway to the North of England and is responsible for the cultural make up of Cities across the North West. In a way this exhibition reflects the city’s heritage, parodying its unabashed neglect for values that we hold so dear today, and yet the exhibition aims to draw parallels with our contemporary ability to disregard these values as and when it suits us. Therefore, within the framework of some of the work, ideas of imperialism are incorporated alongside comments on materialism, consumerism, alienation, globalisation and the cult of celebrity.

The exhibition aims to capture a sense of a globalised society at the beginning of the 21st Century. Each one of these artists uses portraiture to make a statement about the environment in which we find ourselves.