The Gallery
SurgeAlex Duncan
10 September - 30 October 2011
“Within these sought spaces, events and objects can exist that can take us somewhere else; whether they are artworks that look found or found objects that look artist-made.”
Through a variety of materials Swansea based artist Alex Duncan will create a site specific work in Mission Gallery’s space. His work has a hyper-realistic quality, questioning what is real and what has been constructed. The artist plays with scale, adopting the aesthetic of model-making or film-set replicas, working in sculpture, film and installation, moving from small-scale to ambitiously large-scale works. Alex Duncan’s inspiration comes from the fragility and power of the natural world. He spends as much time in the landscape as in his studio, choosing a poetic gesture of humour or focusing on detail to address a concern and connection between the world and the environment, creating a feeling that nature has re-claimed the space.
Drawing us into illusionary worlds, he often devises spaces that take on a new history: a space which might tell the story of an ecological disaster or of an often overlooked moment in nature. He leads us to question whether what we see is real, art or something more complex that sits in between. He creates detailed and precise work, highlighting environmental and ecological issues and often confronts the viewer with an environment more akin to a film set. Instead of conforming to the expectations of a gallery space his work invites us to view it in a way that questions our relationship with the environment and our acknowledgment (or not), of our responsibilities. Within Duncan’s practice, all manner of materials are utilised as the artist attempts to capture moments within nature. By juxtaposing the man-made with the natural, and substituting the natural for a man-made equivalent, he highlights the disconnection between real and fake and the complexities of contemporary experiences of the real and the fake.
