- Venue
- Workstation (The)
- Location
Over a series of exhibitions Stephen Carley has explored themes of family life and the self against a setting of a rapidly changing urban world. In Dum Dums at Sheffield’s Workstation these themes reappear to produce a show of strong graphic images, sculpted objects, photographs and no little wit.
In his new show he demonstrates a more rounded confidence and maturity without losing the edgy excitement of earlier work. Carley doesn’t obey the rules. He is there to make the viewer think hard. As the American artist Keith Haring said, "It is the viewer who creates the reality, the meaning, the conception of the piece. I am merely a middle man trying to bring the ideas together."
In Dum Dums you are pulled every which way. There is no easy code breaker. On entering you are straightaway drawn towards ordered avenues of miniature sculptures, each on it’s own plnth. Here there is a petrified clamp holding fast the lips of a severed face, there a boot of vacuum cleaner dust balancing a lead peanut on a seesaw. The beyond you are confronted by a ragged family of placards that could be out of an Iranian cemetery. And on the walls is a host of shadowy figures, looking for anything like Andy Warhols poster criminals. Eight dramatic white on black drawings with some of the shows recurring objects form an insistent backdrop. But as you puzzle over over the lead paper aeroplanes, meat pies, severed fingers, half open zips and encrusted scissors you look down to find other surprises. Nailed to the plinths are 64 small framed photographs that suddenly lighten the mood. Here are holiday snaps, personal moments, jokey portraits, odd advertisements and a white hooded penitent, like a confessor figure out of Goya. The artists speaks.
The disctionary defines Dum Dum as soft nosed bullet that expands on impact, caused lacerations wherever it makes contact. Not nice. Does it help break the code? Perhaps it does by inviting us to wander and speculate on the meaning of anything and everything. Dum Dums does the business assaulting the senses as it connects the unlikely with the improbable
Stephen Carley registers, filters and communicates a myriad of impulses and experience of everyday life – the family, childhood, sexual tensions, work, war and the struggling self -who am I?, in a mazy spectacle, where there is seemingly no end and no begining. Louise Bourgeois, the French born artist once said, " The artist who discusses the called meaning of his work is usually describing a sie issue. The core of his original impulse is to be found if at all in the work itself."
And here is an artist deep in his own world, somewhere between thinking and feeling, compelled to probe and explore. With Dum Dums Stephen Carley continues his fascinating self exploration, exploding soft bullets somewhere beteen consciousness and being.
Keith Hayman is an artist and consultant based at First Circle Studios, Sheffield
