Haunts and Follies: Curatorial contribution and catalogue

Haunts and Follies: Curatorial contribution and catalogue

'Haunts and Follies': Penny Byrne, Sam Leach, Simon Mee and Kate Rohde.
August 3rd opening night. Closing September 16, 2012
Linden-Centre for Contemporary Art.
Curator and Writer: Simon Mee
Writer: Kim Wilkins

The artists, Penny Byrne, Sam Leach, Simon Mee and Kate Rohde

Haunts and Follies featured new artworks by the artists, Penny Byrne, Sam Leach, Simon Mee and Kate Rohde.

Picture a haunt and a folly, some bizarre spooky pseudo ruin, partially overgrown, the kind of place that if you were watching a D grade horror movie you just know that a girl and a guy would go on and meet the something very much unexpected.

The artists, Penny Byrne, Kate Rohde, Simon Mee and Sam Leach use the historical within their art as a means of dealing with the contemporary. They are all highly skilled in the execution of their art but even if their methods reminiscent of the historical, they leads us away from where we think we were going, the comfortable and familiar, to a destination that is stranger but also strangely enthralling.

Penny Byrne’s work combines meticulous re-workings of porcelain figurines that passionately address a range of issues from the political to the environmental. Kate Rohde teases out sinister twists in a room full of brightly coloured ornate baroque forms. Sam Leach combines his well deserved recognition for his painting with a narrative that seems to combines mad scientists and deranged modernists; animals, birds and nature attempting to escape from the fate of geometrical transmogrification. Simon Mee takes drawing for a walk but through American gothic via French rococo, accompanied by a range of characters you think twice about sitting next to on a bus. These artists are hunting out the locked closet, bricked up room and the funny smell coming from the blocked chimney of subconscious.

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