Carla Cescon, The Apartment, digital print 2010

Bela Lugosi's dead

4 August - 26 August 2010

Carla Cescon, Tony Garifalakis, Simon Scheuerle

Our second show at DEATH BE KIND brings together artists Tony Garifalakis (Melb), Carla Cescon (Sydney), and Simon Schrueule (ACT) who have all established art practices that utilize well know tropes of horror and the grotesque. After the sacred sincerity of The Memorial’s interpretation of death and it effects us personally, Bela Lugos’s dead pushed the boundaries of the galleries theme in another direction to explore the profane and the ritualistic through the iconography of horror.

Garifalakis’s large confronting inverted crosses fashioned from the VHS innards of a broken cassette of The Exorcist filled two walls of the front gallery space. In the adjacent space Carla Cescon had left a range of clues suggestive of pursuit, violence and untimely demise with photographs, a DVD and two figures on life size and the other a smaller doll clone both stabbed through their trench coats. Within the office space Scheuerle installed a range of fashioned artifacts whose surfaces concealed another materiality. Cast, painted bronze cigarette butts, a ticking diamond encrusted bomb, silicone bottles and a floating long haired figure suspended in the center of the space.

The shows title Bela Lugosi’s dead was borrowed from the song by UK 1979 gothic punk band Bauhaus named after the influential art and design movement that embraced the cool objectivity of modernism and the machine aesthetic. The songs pulsating droning beat featured as the opening song in Tony Scotts 1983 cult vampire film The Hunger. Bela Lugosi being the horror film star (1882-1956) who did much to establish the modern vampire image as the title character in the seminal 1931 film Dracula.
Text Elvis Richardson

LESS

Photos Joseph Lambe

 

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