Strange Love

Art | Culture | Ideas

Kirsty Harris, Tom Banks and JohnBrennan: Strange Love, curated by Daniel Barnes

Bankley Gallery, Manchester, 07 – 16 September 2018

Negotiating the lines between ambiguous narratives and the spectacle of the decisive moment, Strange Love explores the contemporary notion of fear as a site of inspiration. The exhibition draws together three artists who interrogate and re-examine beauty as a response to this fear. At the core of this project is the romantic notion that beauty, in and of itself, is a source of great consolation. 

The artists create aesthetic counterpoint and emotional reflection between the media of painting and film. The quiet intimacy of Banks’ small scale works contrasts with the underlying paranoia of Brennan’s larger pieces, whose work in turn hints at some of the Cold War themes of Harris’ painting and film. From Harris’s explosions to Banks’ trees and through Brennan’s portraits, the works oscillate between tension or fear and tranquility or serenity.

In an age of increasing political, economical and environmental uncertainty, humanity is facing profound threats and yet, humanity itself is simultaneously the problem and the solution. Banks’ paintings give voice to these existential concerns through a  dislocation of landscape painting, whereby isolated figures of trees in urban surroundings seem to almost become portraits. Leafless and alone, the trees seem to be questioning their belonging while drawing around themselves a border with the wider world. That sense of isolation is mirrored in Harris’ paintings of nuclear tests: the billowing clouds of toxic dust dominate the landscape, rendering nature a mere setting on which humanity’s drive to self-destruction is played out. In her films, Harris toys with the precarity of the people conducting these dangerous experiences, showing them alone and unprotected and yet without sympathy, focusing instead on responsibility and the wilful sacrifice of man and nature. 

At first sight, Brennan’s portraits may appear innocuous enough, as if they are alluding to the greatest dangers of all – those which are hidden behind a facade. Brennan is interested in capturing a kind of visual paranoia with images that invite contradictory responses. Both uplifting and sinister, Brennan’s portraits show people who appear both harmless and threatening, and everyday things that are uncanny or extraordinary in subtle ways. Brennan completes the pictures of fear that Strange Love explores by bringing the human form into the frey. Rather than focus on nature in its isolation or the effects of chemical warfare, Brennan turns our attention to the people – at once inviting and foreboding – who give a face to the deeds and misdeeds that constitute the human drama. 

Strange Love is the mourning for a loss which is forever delayed in its passing, but which infuses every moment of contemporary life with an indelible struggle. In focusing, even sometimes fixating, upon our own fallibilities we come to see anew the perpetual condition of fear as a welter of possibility.

Tom Banks
Kirsty Harris