5 July - 22 July 2006

Artist C.V.
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A Cool Armageddon by Ashley Crawford

“With acceleration there is no here and there, only the mental confusion of near and far, present and future, real and unreal…” – Paul Virillio, The art of the motor – The shrinking effect, 1993.

The car crash is one inevitable end-point of contemporary Western culture. The clash and klang of advertising – the neon pulse of fast food and fast life is the other. These glittering collisions are the landscape of Giles Ryder.

In 1970 the British writer J.G. Ballard exhibited the hulking bodies of crashed automobiles at the New Arts Laboratory gallery in London, appropriately called Crashed Cars. This aestheticisation of the car crash was an ongoing obsession for Ballard, whose novel Crash explored the erotic potential of grinding metal and shattered glass. This was the ready-made in extremis, the visceral remains of mayhem relocated into the pristine world of art in a violent surrealist gesture.

“A car crash harnesses elements of eroticism, aggression, desire, speed, drama, kinesthetic factors, the stylizing of motion, consumer goods, status – all these in one event,” Ballard has said. “I myself see the car crash as a tremendous sexual event really; a liberation of human and machine libido….”

Perhaps comparing Ballard’s fascinations with the work of Giles Ryder is going too far, but there can be no doubt that the two share a fascination with the automobile in its most abstracted forms. With his harshly lit fluorescents and reflective automobile paint, Giles Ryder is also exploring the aftermath of modernism. His metallic constructions grip the gallery walls like immovable bulwarks, while his neon constructions dominate the floor space like a sprawling street map of a glowing and pulsating Tokyo.

While Los Angeles may be the ultimate ‘automobile city’ Ryder’s process is in fact more reminiscent of the compact, neon-drenched reduction of Tokyo. As opposed to an urban sprawl, Ryder deals with compression, with the condensation of colour, a miniturised metropolis, a compact Shinjuku. read more>