Golden Thread Gallery Current

The GT Gallery is pleased invite to the opening of The Subjects , a new solo exhibition by Belfast based artist Ian Charlesworth, on Saturday the 5 th December 2005 from 2.00pm – 4.00pm.

The exhibition uses drawing, photography, and video, in order to investigate the problems inherent within an ‘indexical' reading of representation. It examines both the ‘gestural trace' of the expressive humanist painting/drawing, and the ‘passive trace' of the documentary photograph/video.

Importantly, despite undermining the assumptions of ‘indexicality', and the implied causal basis of representation, there is also an attempt within the work to maintain a link between the image and its referent.

The drawings are specifically concerned with the link between the artist's body and the ‘gestural' mark. As, although the drawings indicate that ‘gesture' should be understood as the play of symbolic forms rather than as indexical markers, they also paradoxically show that ‘gesture' can still be used in the production of meaning in an artwork. Here the acronym for the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), a protestant paramilitary force, has been repeatedly drawn with a cigarette lighter on to the surface of a series of light boxes. The marks are a replication of the marks made by youths in public spaces throughout the North, and in the re-articulation of these scatological daubings, a space opens between the private and public space of ‘gesture' as a physical and cultural act.

The photographic and video works question the assumption of psychological access and ‘indexical' transparency within lens based representation. They are a re-working of the documentary portrait and specifically the portrayal of Belfast's urban youth in both the media and social documentary. For The Subjects a number of actors were hired from an agency that provides young actors for the film and television industry. The photographs are somewhere between staged photographs of urban youths and depictions of the actors themselves in an artificial photographic situation.

This exhibition represents a new, original and comprehensive approach to the problems of representation and ‘indexicality' in contemporary art practice, as well as highlighting the difficulties in dealing with the contemporary urban youth of a post-Troubles period.

Charlesworth is a Belfast based artist who is currently a Fellow at the British School at Rome. Recent exhibitions have included The Nature of Things , Venice Biennale, Northern Ireland Exhibition (2005), Artistas Visuales De Belfast , La Sala Naranja, Valencia (2005), The Belfast Way , Herzlia Museum, Tel Aviv (2005), From Dark Passages , Gallery Lipoli and Lopez, Rome (2005) Jerwood Drawing prize , Jerwood Space, London (2003), Greyscale/CMYK , RHA, Dublin (2003).

The exhibition The Subjects will be available for hire at a subsidised rate throughout 2006, as part of the gtgTouring Program, supported by an Audience Development Award from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, National Lottery. For further details and to find out about other gtgTouring Programs available through 2006 & 2007 contact Sarah at the gallery.

Schools, colleges and community group visits to the gallery are welcomed. Please contact Ruth or Lisa at the gallery to arrange group visits in advance or to find out more about the galleries associated activities.