Daniel K Sparkes

Meta Snout

Exploring the transitions from life to death, physicality to non-physicality, and all that exists between reality and illusion, META SNOUT invites you to cross the threshold, snout first, into the alter worlds of Daniel Sparkes (Mudwig) & Russell Maurice, for their first joint London exhibition.

Keeping true to their individual styles, Maurice and Sparkes combine forces to expose the cryptic underbelly of modern life as we know it--- and it ain’t always a pretty sight.  Marked by totemic symbols reminiscent of Alchemic iconography, scattered doorways serve as portals to outer realms that span historical reference and physical nature.  This is not Narnia.  This is what happens when the familiar layers of pop-culture get stripped away and skinned alive, when modern moves back to Medieval.  

Drawing upon the Golden Age of Hollywood animation, Maurice and Sparkes incorporate butchered, fragmentized cartoon elements that translate both as distilled renditions of ‘reality’, and as the entrails of a life of illusion.  The theme of death permeates the scene and instills a metaphysical investigation, Scooby-Doo style.  This is a case where anything goes; where alchemy gives way to tangible substance, and life-forms become landscapes.  Their mission: combine and contradict, from one dimension to the next.

15 October 2010 - 13 November 2010