The Eighteenth Emergency

Private View: 26 AUGUST 2010: 6.30-8.30pm

27 AUGUST - 4 SEPTEMBER 2010

Deptford Last Friday Late Opening: 27 AUGUST 2010; we remain open until 8:30pm

Andrew Bryant, Frauke Dannert, Chas Higginbottom, Burcu Yagcioglu, Daniel Lichtman and Stefan Sulzer

Core Gallery is delighted to present 'The Eighteenth Emergency', an exhibition that brings together the work of 6 emerging international artists.

The exhibition takes as its prompt Betsy Byers' short novel 'The Eighteenth Emergency,' a text, which sees two boys create a series of action plans for unexpected and exotic 'emergencies'. Apparently a 'rights of passage' book for adolescent boys, in Andrew's rereading of the text the real emergency reveals itself to be masculinity itself, when one of the boys, whose nickname, significantly, is Mouse, finds himself on the wrong side of school bully Mary Hammerman.  According to Andrew the narrative unwittingly reveals the violence at the heart of masculine identity, when in the penultimate scene the two boys literally knock each other into position.

As a counterpoint to Byers' novel, Andrew draws a lot of inferences from Queer Theory, in particular the work of Judith Butler, who describes masculinity as a nexus of fears about feminisation and homophobia. In a culture of individuals who define themselves through gendered identity and desire, is it possible that this panicked masculinity produces varying intensities of intersubjective violence, which are played out across personal, social, political and even aesthetic boundaries? These are the questions the exhibition attempts to address.

Press Release

Core Gallery Interview: with Curator Andrew Bryant