Man Cave
Invite text:
Masculinity, particularly the white kind, is in a form of crisis or at best, self-reflection. The decrepit temple of Man Cave addresses the contemporary masculine as a species of the grotesque - messy and unresolved, monstrous, tragi-comic, and smelling a bit like socks. Plumbing the depths of colonial amnesia, Dominic Redfern channels his Celtic roots to find the rot has set in.
Favourite comment from the opening:
“I’m in a 2nd year engineering student’s bedroom, we’re probably going to have sex. But it won’t be good.”
Biliana Agin, Psychologist
Man Cave is an audio visual installation utilises the tradition of the grotesque as a means of exploring masculine gender identities. The term grotesque comes from the Italian for cave, ‘grotto’. This naming relates to the re-discovery of some previously unknown subterranean parts of Nero’s palace, the Domus Aurea in the 16th century – sparking the origin of the grotesque tradition in its modern incarnation. As we go through an ongoing period of reckoning with the ‘white supremacist capitalist patriarchy’ (to quote bell hooks), masculinity is in a form of crisis or at best, self-reflection. Man Cave addresses this moment with curiosity and without apology. It seeks rather to explore the masculine as a species of grotesque. Just as the contemporary masculine defies traditional norms or easy definition, so the work is messy and unresolved, monstrous and tragi-comic. AI is being deployed as apposite co-creator in its uncanny moment. Like the contemporary masculine, another chimeric creature – lurking everywhere yet elusive, AI is an unquantified threat that is nonetheless an impossible to ignore element of contemporary society. This in-betweenness is captured in the corrupted aesthetic of broken technology, broken morphologies, broken texts, and ‘bad’ design. The grotesque is a thread in western art that deals very specifically with that which defies definition, escapes language. It has also, since the 18th century, come to be associated with the abject, the unsightly, the unpleasant, the distasteful, the impolite. Contemporary masculinity is well suited for exploration in this slippery tradition of the not quite right. Man Cave does not offer solutions but writhes around in this messy moment to create a decrepit temple of the Res Artis Project Space.
Installation detail
Installation view
Installation view