Danny Aldred's New Show: Fantasies of Escapism and Containment
Teaching Fellow in Graphic Arts, Danny Aldred, is presenting his new book works at an exhibition hosted by the Winchester Gallery between 8 - 24 May 2012. Private view on 4 May at 5pm.
Fantasies of Escapism and Containment
Opening a book’s cover is like stepping over a threshold, the initiation of a new journey; a border crossing. We map our life’s journey to the progression of a book: starting a new chapter in one’s life; closing the book on something implies finality, a parting of ways. Yet, a truly entrancing text lingers in the mind long after you put it down; it can cloud your waking hours, drawing you back into the environs it conjured. A book’s world escapes its bound state.
Yet (now like the ancients migrating from the scroll to the codex) we face the digital revolution. The gradual dematerialisation of the book as object has initiated a resurgence in the poetic appreciation of the book as a vehicle of sensory experiences (haptic, visual, even aromatic).
Danny Aldred explores these signs of fantasy, escape, and containment (traversing the boundaries of biblioclasm in tension with a eulogistic cremation as an alchemical performance). In these new works we are invited to judge the book by its covers as both indexical and symbolic sites of signification. These suggestive abstractions interrogate the concrete object that is the book at its moment of transformation, emphasising the temporality of the book as object and format. The evocation of absence as trace is a pleasing focus of Aldred’s project in fantasies of escapism and containment.