Man Cave
9 screen video installation | stereo sound | 2025
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 was an audio visual installation that utilised the tradition of the grotesque as a means of exploring masculine gender identities. The term grotesque came from the Italian for cave, 'grotto'. This naming related 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 was in a form of crisis or at best, self-reflection. Man Cave addressed this moment with curiosity and without apology. It sought rather to explore the masculine as a species of grotesque. Just as the contemporary masculine defied traditional norms or easy definition, so the work was messy and unresolved, monstrous and tragi-comic.
AI was deployed as apposite co-creator in its uncanny moment. Like the contemporary masculine, another chimeric creature – lurking everywhere yet elusive, AI was an unquantified threat that was nonetheless an impossible to ignore element of contemporary society. This in-betweenness was captured in the corrupted aesthetic of broken technology, broken morphologies, broken texts, and 'bad' design. The grotesque was a thread in western art that dealt very specifically with that which defied definition, escaped language. It had also, since the 18th century, come to be associated with the abject, the unsightly, the unpleasant, the distasteful, the impolite. Contemporary masculinity was well suited for exploration in this slippery tradition of the not quite right. Man Cave did not offer solutions but writhed around in this messy moment to create a decrepit temple of the Res Artis Project Space.
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 was an audio visual installation that utilised the tradition of the grotesque as a means of exploring masculine gender identities. The term grotesque came from the Italian for cave, 'grotto'. This naming related 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 was in a form of crisis or at best, self-reflection. Man Cave addressed this moment with curiosity and without apology. It sought rather to explore the masculine as a species of grotesque. Just as the contemporary masculine defied traditional norms or easy definition, so the work was messy and unresolved, monstrous and tragi-comic.
AI was deployed as apposite co-creator in its uncanny moment. Like the contemporary masculine, another chimeric creature – lurking everywhere yet elusive, AI was an unquantified threat that was nonetheless an impossible to ignore element of contemporary society. This in-betweenness was captured in the corrupted aesthetic of broken technology, broken morphologies, broken texts, and 'bad' design. The grotesque was a thread in western art that dealt very specifically with that which defied definition, escaped language. It had also, since the 18th century, come to be associated with the abject, the unsightly, the unpleasant, the distasteful, the impolite. Contemporary masculinity was well suited for exploration in this slippery tradition of the not quite right. Man Cave did not offer solutions but writhed around in this messy moment to create a decrepit temple of the Res Artis Project Space.