7 - 18 January 2011
iArt Gallery Wembley: A Project Room for Contemporary Art
Beginning on Friday 7 and continuing until Tuesday 18 January the Mermaids and the Unicorns will come head to head in a battle of the sexes at iArt Gallery Wembley: A Project Room for Contemporary Art. The ancient battle will take the form of a process drawing, which will be added to through the duration of the show, and a collection of auxiliary works.
The reference to Lysistrata in the title of the exhibition provides the key to the history of the battle. Lysistrata, one of the few surviving plays by Aristophanes, tells the story of a group of women (led by the brave Lysistrata) who grind The Peloponnesian War to a halt by denying their menfolk the privileges of sex until they abandon the glories of battle. However, the metaphorical plot of Strydom’s battle thickens as, in his typical style, he draws indiscriminately from history and mythology to populate his story with characters that are not quite (or not at all) human.
Unicorns and Mermaids are not connected to each other mythologically. However, each of them has a rich allegorical past – Mermaids being the femmes fatale half woman, half fish guilty of luring sailors to their watery graves, and the Unicorn a symbol of male virility, owing to its phallic horn. The works accompanying the process drawing depict battle plans, diagrams and unicorns and kings of fertility in various stages of fighting, dying and being born again. The process drawing, following the example of Aristophanes, is divided into “acts” depicting the two sides preparing for and engaging in battle, and the aftermath of the confrontation.
Although the battle between the mythological creatures implies a straightforward confrontation between male and female, contradictions and anomalies in Strydom’s expression point to less simple tensions of sexuality that exist within each of us, a notion rich with Freudian undertones, and with which we literally battle throughout our lives.