Artist Profiles
Dominic Allan
Dominic Allan’s work is redolent of the ethical and pragmatic Orwell of My Country Left or Right or The Lion and The Unicorn. In Allan’s hands this is infused with the sparkle of a candyfloss rush together with a valedictory reflection upon the hangover that is Britain’s seaside culture. This is a culture that has always been driven by some substance or other.Sugar, alcohol, smack. Allan’s Our Destination was Lutopia is a visceral work both disgusting and alluring. Constructed from strawberry whips and panel pins, it is an injunction to get horny. Abandoned joggle-eyed bicycles, photographs of rickety piers bereft of human activity, the work is unpopulated, save by the mug shot of a missing child. This metonymic quality, the appeal to something or someone else is an inversion of the escapism and promises, the bright lights that once attracted Britons to the seaside in their droves, slaves as they were to shiny metaphor. In Allan’s work we are confronted with a sugary octane axis and its effect upon British seaside culture; the saccharine hedonism and distractions of the age before Easyjet, reigned in by British parochialism and compulsory fun; where the dilapidated Victorian proscenium lives cheek by jowl with the misery of the junky, the migrant worker, and thesans-papier prozzer.
http://www.transitiongallery.co.uk/htmlpages/fatty_gingo.htm
