DOROTHY CROSS

L'Air

22 April - 26 May 2005

Frith Street Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by Dorothy Cross.

In his meditation on photography and death, Roland Barthes identifies an effect he simply calls l'air, some indefinable "expression" or "look" in the photograph of a lost loved one where the reality of death suddenly takes one by surprise, leading one" to that cry, the end of all language: "There she is!"... words fail. That singular "air" that unique manner or presence of the loved one in the image, is as insubstantial and fleeting as its homonym "air"

Robyn Lyndenberg, from Gone. A publication to accompany Dorothy Cross' forthcoming exhibition at The McMullen Museum, Boston

A great deal of the raw material for this show comes from Dorothy Cross' own physical surroundings; the flotsam and jetsam that washes up on the beach outside her home on Ireland's Atlantic coast. Here the sea gives up its dead - a Gannet with its pristine plumage still intact, a family of spider crabs, a giant Sperm Whale - Cross transforms these creatures through taxidermy, casting in bronze or simply presenting them as an image of their former selves.

Central to the exhibition is a new video work shot under the icebergs of Antarctica, this is a landscape defined by its shifting form, here the same place can be unrecognisable from one day to the next as the ice melts or drifts away. Cross' piece evokes the strange and unsettling discontinuity of the location.

The final room contains a large piece of driftwood. Inlaid on the surface is the world SALVE which the artist copied exactly from the doorstep of Goethe's home in Weimar. Applied to a seemingly worthless object and combined with its historical ties the work is rich in both historical and cultural associations.

***

An exhibition of Dorothy Cross' ephemeral projects 'Gone' is currently on show at the McMullen Museum, Boston College, USA until 12 July. A major retrospective of Cross' work will open at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on 3 June and continue until 11 September, this show will be accompanied by the most comprehensive publication of the artist's work to date. Cross is currently working on a collaborative project with the Irish actor Fiona Shaw - this work has been specially commissioned by Cork 2005 as part of the city's celebrations of it's status as European Capital of Culture - entitled Monte Notte, it will receive its premier at Spike Island in Cork Harbour in August of this year.

More images and biography can be found on Dorothy Cross artist page.
Dorothy Cross artist page

For further information please contact Dale McFarland on +44 20 7494 1550

 

© 2005 Frith Street Gallery