- Venue
- WW gallery
- Starts
- Friday, July 1, 2011
- Ends
- Sunday, July 17, 2011
- Address
- 30 Queensdown Rd, London E5 8NN
- Location
- London
WW Gallery is pleased to present The MacGuffin, an exhibition of paintings by Wendy Elia and Marguerite Horner. The MacGuffin is a term associated with Hitchcock when discussing the suspense techniques in his films. By definition the MacGuffin is nothing; it is ambiguous or indefinable and can be open to interpretation. It is the catalyst that sets a story in motion, even if, by the end of the plot, we have sometimes forgotten what it was. Whatever it is or isn’t, the MacGuffin is also present in Elia’s and Horner’s work, a deliciously dark device, something lurking, or elusive. In Elia’s work, a seductive palette is deliberately at odds with her sometimes disconcerting narratives and in Horner’s monochrome scenes, we may never be sure if the tension resides in the occasional jolts of colour, the innocuous looking pallid houses, or along the tight telephone lines running across the horizon of so many of her paintings. Viewing the work of both painters, one feels witness to something that has either happened or is about to happen, which evokes feelings of familiarity as well as alienation. The Uncanny, then, is a central theme for both artists.
