V22 ASHWINSTREET

KENNARD & PHILLIPPS - OBSCENITY

This exhibition brings together for the first time the collaborative work made about Iraq by Peter Kennard and Cat Picton-Phillipps 2003-2006. During this time they have pummeled and bashed the photographs coming back from Iraq with paint, charcoal, dirt and newsprint, using a multiplicity of materials to portray the horror unleashed in Iraq. The exhibition traces the development of their work from the framed series of prints Award bought by and currently on show at the Victoria and Albert Museum to their current work which is broken and torn, unframed and loose as if they are trying to physically engage the viewer in the violence perpetrated.

For the set of digital prints Award they ripped apart US and British flags and then placed them on a digital scanner with blood, oil and dust. Combined with photos from Iraq this resulted in a set of images based on the form of a medal which became more broken, dense and confused as the results of the invasion took hold.

Rejecting the framed, fine art finish of Award they attempted to bring the subject matter through art into a public building, making a large installation Demo for City Hall, London. Hundreds of placards displaying photomontages were wound round the interior of the building, each one jammed into cement embedded with shoes, glasses, necklaces…….. They continued by making work in a deliberately more public form participating in eastInternational ’05 where they created an installation in which the viewer could become participant in the creation of work and where they created, produced and distributed free posters for the duration of the exhibition. Click here to view the work.

As the violence in Iraq escalated, they moved on to make large-scale work in an attempt to make history paintings of the ongoing occupation, combining digital photomontage and paint on long scroll-like canvases stapled, unstretched, to the wall. In this series of work Untitled (Iraq) images of the Allied control rooms and the paraphernalia of war are visually locked together with the resulting carnage.

Rejecting the more formal use of art materials in their current work they make DIY canvases of newspaper and paste overlaid with thin paper prints of images from Iraq and Lebanon.

Kennard and Phillipps have said of their most recent work:

“The madness, rapaciousness and greed of the Bush Blair axis is impossible to picture but we try to create a dialogue with the pictorial results of their obscene actions and our work becomes more, more splintered, rough and smashed in response to the results of their criminality. The materials we make the work in become more dominant, the neat frames used in our first work are rejected, the canvas we then used is rejected, now we work on thin paper and newspaper, transient materials whose fragility is aligned with the oppressed people represented in the work. In our latest work the images of Iraqi civilians become more immaterial as if the people themselves are dissolving into the paper on which they are represented. The surface is pockmarked, torn, attacked, the work looks unfinished, the violence unleashed by this war has no end in sight.”

Kennard and Phillipps’ Award is currently on show in Prints Now at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Peter Kennard’s photomontage work 1973-1999 is on show in Media Burn at Tate Modern, London from 16th Dec 2006.

Kennard and Phillipps are exhibiting recent work in Antennae at Houston Centre for Photography, Texas in April 2007.