Embellish at the trafalgar presents new work by TAG artists Simon Allen, Victoria Hall, Sarah Lee, The Little Artists and Simon Phillips. The exhibition considers the theme of identity. Despite contrasting media, a common theme runs through their work: the use of costume, props and make-up to mask, transform and reveal the subject.
Simon Allen is a recent graduate in film and photography from Ireland who experiments with identity through a series of Untitled Film Stills (2006). Choosing Barbie as his subject, Allen recreates familiar film motifs. However, his re-presentation of Barbie as a corrupted and ruined avatar is a far cry from her usual role as the child fantasy of adult perfection and fulfilment. Allen’s conscious engagement with gender stereotyping celebrates – in glazed, reflexive irony – the corrosion of the subject/object.
Victoria Hall’s sophisticated re-stagings of British and European historical paintings pay homage to a bygone age of lavish costumes and colourful period drama. By casting herself as the leading lady in all of her photographs, she presents the viewer with a humorous and provocative insight into the identity of the contemporary artist. This is further explored by her openly acknowledged reference to the female as object of the male gaze. However, Hall’s historical constructs negate the self-aggrandizing charge to which her work might lay itself open: her re-presentations strike a note of humility and elicit a surprising pathos. For instance, in After Hockney, based on Hockney’s Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy, she removes Mr Percy altogether, effortlessly shifting the viewer’s full attention to her vulnerable and isolated in the midst of a canonised work.
Sarah Lee is a freelance photographer for The Guardian. This series of photographs follows three international drag queens in the act of transformation, tracing in detail the journey from the blank canvas of the body to the final embellished result. These images are entertaining, beautiful and intriguing: they not only scrutinise the roles assumed by the subjects, but also the role of the photographer in this seemingly detached negotiation: is the lens invasive or sympathetic, embarrassed or brazen - true or false? By asking these questions of the viewer, Lee invites us to consider the problematic relations at the heart of all portraiture.
Simon Phillips is a photographer who specialises in social documentary. This series focuses upon the East End Trannie scene, and poses similar questions to those of Sarah Lee. His richly colourful work explores the role of performance and the attraction of the attention it affords.
The Little Artists are concerned with cultural identity and branding. Their Concealing Claire series are kitsch toilet roll dolls that take their starting point as the dresses worn by Turner Prize winner, Grayson Perry in his transvestite alter-ego form, Claire. The dresses are hand-knitted and richly embroidered, covering two toilet rolls (one blue, one orange), whilst the dolls themselves are, deliberately, the British icon Sindy.
The selected artists handle the subject of identity in different ways, but in each case the work included in the exhibition demonstrates how the artist simultaneously engage and subvert our interpretation of it as they seek to show the shifting nature of identity.
the trafalgar, by definition the most central hotel in London, pioneers a concept that combines stylish living, innovative food and drink and an ever evolving programme of inspiring art. The hotel’s philosophy is to eliminate traditional boundaries, opening up the space as a platform for guests and visitors to the hotel to discover new and unexpected art in all forms.
