28 April 2007

Thomas Draschan

THOMAS DRASCHAN
Carter Presents
29 April - 27 May 2007

Carter Presents is delighted to exhibit the first solo show in the UK of Austrian artist Thomas Draschan who will be presenting his installation "Resemblances Between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics".

In this new piece the film and video work is not only accompanied by large-scale collages, but has expanded out into the gallery. An altar-like totemic TV monitor shows the colourful flickering results of the quick fire editing of two commercials. Draschan has united the two films with around 1000 hand-made splices that almost make the TV set explode. The resulting collision of images a cacophony of stimuli is driven beyond the monitor frame by its sheer kinetic energy in to the room and beyond. The whole installation can best be seen from a seat especially made for this purpose: a Florence Knoll design classic that has been seriously abused by gluing onto it all the images that form Thomas Draschan's cosmic universe.


The complex symbolic language of Draschan's work is inspired by such thinkers and writer as j.k. huysmans, c.g. jung, gustave flaubert and Sigmund Freud. The exhibition refers both to Freud's collection of antique phallic figures surrounding his desk at the Freud Museum in London and to his book "Totem and Taboo" (1913).

Freud writes, "If the totem animal is the father, then the two principal ordinances of totemism, the two taboo prohibitions which constitute its core - not to kill the totem and not to have sexual relations with a woman of the same totem - coincide in their content with the two crimes of Oedipus, who killed his father and married his mother, as well as with the two primal wishes of children, the insufficient repression or the re-awakening of which forms the nucleus of perhaps every psychoneurosis."

Thus the multi layering interdisciplinary and transgressive nature to the work reaches in to our primitive and damaged psyches, through barely known apocryphal religious writings, pulp novels, classic Italian porn and saccharine mass produced comics which inform and become the work. Thomas Draschan embraces the deviant pubescent miscreant in us all and this installation, at its core, is both savagely neurotic and neurotically savage.

Thomas Draschan born 1967 Lives and works in Vienna. He studied at the Academie of Fine Arts in Frankfurt and at Cooper Union in NY. He is working with video, film and collage. The re-combination of existing images into a new, condensed and enriched form is one of his main concerns. Draschan has exhibited widely in Europe and The USA since 1998, he has been the recipient of numerous awards for his experimental films. His films include documentaries on Viennese Actionist Herman Nitsch and music videos for New Order.

www.draschan.com

Private View: Saturday 28 April 2007, from 6.30-9.00pm

Please Note: The works in this exhibition contain sexual and violent content and may cause offence. Any persons under the age of 16 may only enter if accompanied by an adult.

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Carter Presents
29 Orsman Road, London, N1 5RA
MAP OF AREA

Gallery open Monday-Friday, 10am-6pm (by appointment)
Telephone: 020 7012 1203 prior to view

www.carterpresents.com

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