Participating Artists
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The Collector II: Acanthus, 2005, paper cut, glass and wood, 84 x 116 x 3 cm, courtesy of the artist and Museum 52, London
Tom Gallant
Tom Gallant makes use of Asian paper cutting traditions (Karigami) in order to create stunning vegetal models out of the pages of porno magazines. He cuts the paper by hand, without any mechanical intervention. These works are part of a series called "The Collector II," which alludes to William Morris - a founder of the Arts and Crafts Movement who significantly influenced the development of decorative art in Victorian England (some of the patterns are based on wallpaper and carpet patterns designed by Morris). An additional source of inspiration for these works was The Yellow Wallpaper - a novel written by the Victorian feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The novel's protagonist is a woman whose stifling marriage and sense of helplessness push her to the brink of insanity. The wallpaper in her home functions as a metaphor for late 19th century bourgeois mores, and she imagines a woman imprisoned among the vegetal patterns. The women in Gallant's works are similarly imprisoned among the lattices of paper cuts. The obsessive process of cutting the magazine pages may thus be read as a metaphor for the desire to control female sexuality, and to transform women into aestheticized, domesticated and passive objects.
Born in Surrey, England, 1975; lives and works in Brussels and London
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