Teenage Kicks
Daniela Wolfer 'Sarah II' 2005 Oil on canvas 120cm x 60 cm Courtesy of Galerie Hammelehle und Ahrens, Cologne
David Hancock 'Mother, I Can Feel the Soil Falling Over My Head' Acrylic on Canvas 244 x 147 cm 2007
Jemima Brown
Dean Chalkley
Luc Dondeyne,
Erica Eyres
David Hancock
Ivan Jones
Alex McQuilkin
Ari Versluis
Klaus Wanker
Daniela Wolfer
Angie Reed
Curator: Melanie Moreau
Ken Pratt, co-curator
“I need excitement oh I need it bad/And it’s the best, I’ve ever had” -The Undertones (1978)
Vegas Gallery, as part of the edgy Brick Lane area, couldn’t be a better choice to welcome the new episode of Family Viewing ” Teenage Kicks”. Initiated by the artist Jemima Brown during 2005, and as part of her practice, Family Viewing is a broad interpretation of the idea of ‘family’. Each episode invites artists and curators to become a snapshot of the family album. The artists selected today cover a full range of media and practices, proposing miscellaneous interpretations about the pubertal world, the search for a unique social identity, and its consequences within family and society.
In the grand tradition of rebellion, the simple act of dancing becomes a provocation with Daniela Wolfer and Ari Versluis. Through flashy sexuality and frenzy, yet trapped between childhood and adulthood, they seem to desperately search a way to escape the existential questions of a future. In the same sense, David Hancock’s painting and Alex McQuilkin’s video recreate melodramatic scenes who express an intriguing duality between beauty and destruction, where theatrically excessive, they can veer from comic to tragic in a matter of moments; and vice and versa.
Their rite of passage are various, yet similar. Dean Chalkley reports the excitement to believe in a new and different generation, yet familiar, where despite getting messy or dirty, they remain kind of sweet and innocent. Teenage is a posing time under influence.
From fashion or movie icons with Klaus Wanker, to rock stars with Luc Dondeyne, the desire to be someone special can be mistaken with the one for fame and recognition. Even Angie Reed’s young punk dreams about it, since Warhol’s prophecy created a cult for individualism via celebrity and stardom, as the only way to uniqueness.
Not to forget they are fragile. Erica Eyres and Jemima Brown’s ambiguous drawings, a media usually attached to children, show disturbed and/or disturbing lolitas, when Ivan Jones’ s work thrives on a familial tension with a sense of foreboding and claustrophobia. Nowadays, teenagers are searching for clues to their identity within a society where dysfunctional families are common, with ageless and disoriented parents who compete with them in the search for happiness.
Though everyone remembers the angst of being a teenager, we also long for their excitement and their dreams, since the beatniks and the hippies reduce the gap between generations. And perhaps, as Teenage Kicks suggests, in a society where hedonism and individualism are treasured, teenager’s behaviours seem no longer only referring to the puberal world.
Melanie Moreau © 2007