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Dave McKean And Friends At The Pumphouse

Published Sat, 14 Aug 2010 04:00:39 -0500

Dave McKean has been posting photos of his new exhibition at the Pumphouse Gallery in Battersea, London. Along with Adam Dant, Daniel Merlin Goodbrey and Warren Pleece, he's part of Hypercomics, just opened, and running until the end of September. The gallery describes it;

Hypercomics explores the shape of comics to come, in an exhibition that liberates artists from the confines of the printed page and singular narrative. Unlike conventional comics, Hypercomics offers the spectator an interactive choice of multiple storylines, each giving different perspectives on the same character, place or event. Here comics are placed into the context of an art gallery allowing their stories the unique opportunity to relate to one another from wall-to-wall and floor-to-floor. Each artist presents a newly commissioned work conceived specific to Pump House Gallery, using its setting, history or architecture as a springboard.

While Dave McKean's own section, The Rut is;

three characters' viewpoints of an assault in the park: Perpetrator, Victim and Witness. In later years, as all three relive this traumatic event, their roles and the truth become more ambiguous. McKean begins his tales in drawings and then unfolds them across sculpture, photography and other media.

Photos by Dave McKean

The rest of the exhibits are described;

Adam Dant has transformed the top mezzanine level of the gallery into the period tromp l'oeil library of a Doctor London. Its wooden bookcases house shelf after shelf of bizarre tomes, their spines and titles painted in oil on canvas. Organised by body part from top to bottom, these books document the doctor's narrative autopsy of the capital, which is also represented by a streetmap overlaid with an anatomical drawing, merging actual and biological topology.

Daniel Merlin Goodbrey creates an alternate history for the gallery as an archive for infamous glam-rock dictator Hieronymus Pop and charts the facets of its lone archivist at work, at play and in dreams. Each wall engages the viewer in a grid of multi-directional storylines. The fourth glass wall leads to a further virtual manifestation.

Interacting with Warren Pleece's animated installation 'Montague Terrace', the audience will be able to pry into the lives of four dysfunctional tenants: Marvo the magic bunny, the insidious Puppeteer, Paul Gregory the wannabe celebrity and Babushka an unlikely covert spy. Pleece imagines the Pump House redeveloped as the Montague Terrace apartments and turns the gallery space into a fifth seedy flat from which to spy on the other 'inmates'.

The show has been curated by ComICA's Paul Gravett. So naturally there will be screenings, talks and general get togethers, including an evening with McKean on the 23rd September.

There will also be comic character creation workshops, a comics fair, turning strips into sculptures,

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