Past

Sam Porritt and Tom Chamberlain

May 20 - June 3 2007

The colour red, fly-agaric mushrooms, fluorescent poisonous frogs: the natural world is full of signs that imply danger while creating desire. In order for an animal to communicate that it won't taste very good, it has to be visible in the first place. This survival strategy is full of contradictions, banking on the production of fear to allow the animal to hide in plain sight. The simple tactics of the stick insect aren't half as interesting.

Many animals protect themselves by looking similar to another poisonous creature. This presents quite a complex phenomenological problem. The desirable prey is a “fake”, a seemingly deadly but actually quite tasty impersonation of another animal. The imposter hopes that its lethal appearance will overwhelm the predator's desire to feed; the predator's need to eat causes it to make an instinctive leap that its prey is merely bluffing. As a contrast, we've all heard stories of a tourist approaching a seemingly mild-mannered koala, only to be mauled when the animal suddenly turns vicious. True or not, these stories reinforce our sense that appearances do deceive, sometimes with disastrous consequences.

The complex semiotics of the animal kingdom can also apply quite readily to the understanding of an artwork. The ability of a work to deceive is often couched in the terms of charlatanism, the sense that the artist is getting away with something too easy, of being a fake. But what about an artwork that appears initially deadly, only to reveal itself as a well-executed, practical addition to a home? A sleight-of-hand, a trompe l'oeil, a confusion of appearances can also provide a key to a larger framework of understanding. It suggests that the work cannot be understood at a glance, that it resides within a complex set of relations that require time and thought to reveal themselves.