4 April to 12 May 2002
Thursday-Sunday 12-6pm
This is a landscape of caves and shadows, far from gleaming linear modernity, a space where the subconscious can cultivate its strategies and deliver unexpected and devastating blows to the body.
The exhibition is about these ‘voices from the id’ and the absurdity of taking life at face-value. Cycles of acute isolation and abandonment that cannot be simply broken, are obscured by modern day myopia and a desire for a future devoid of such emotional history.
This ambitious commission places the viewer within what is viewed: an elaborate folly combining confessional TV with the sublime, an obsessive collection of information, a domestic space and a wishing well. This cathartic landscape is shaped by emotions that have been damaged by and subsequently undermine the institutional tool of language.
John Isaacs has consistently explored themes that warp the distinctions between science, popular culture and the subconscious in a bid to reveal the inner machinations of contemporary civilisation. This serious endeavour has set him apart from some of the more commercially inclined young British artists of the 1990’s.
‘voices from the id’ is commissioned by Beaconsfield as the first exhibition in the 2002/3 programme.
‘voices from the id’ is supported by the Henry Moore Foundation and the Elephant Trust.