Spit Roast
Jennifer Allen & Jo Wilmot
opens at Gallery 33 on 16th February 2007 and closes 6th April 2007.
Gallery hours: 11.00 – 1900 Monday to Friday, Saturday 11.00-16.00

Gallery 33 is pleased to announce the commencement of its 2007 exhibition programme with the opening of Spit Roast. The show features Jennifer Allen and Jo Wilmot, two British artists, whose practice stems from an interest in glamour and failure.

In the UK the term Spit Roast has two very different meanings: one is of a rotating joint of meat which is roasting on a spit, the other is a slang term for a ‘gang bang’ involving more men than women. In 2003 the expression came into common parlance as result of the exploits of a footballers being covered extensively in the tabloid press.

Allen and Wilmot’s work is concerned with the undercutting of illusion and the failure of expectation.

Allen's practice is concerned with the transgression of facade and the construction of behavioural boundaries. Her performance/videos explore the point at which Glamour becomes uncrowned and thus reveals its immanent juxtaposition with banality and/or failure.

Allen works a striptease dancer and consequently much of her art practice is influenced by this. Her performance/video work choreographs contexts to enable glamour/striptease dancing to exist alongside the everyday, death and abjection

Whilst glamour can be seen as separate from banality, Allen is also interested in the dialectics of this relationship, and the possibility that glamour employs the everyday, death, abjection, and that this relationship serves to enhance glamour. Allen's practice is concerned with the question of what glamour and fantasy can be or indeed is.

This dialectic is explored through her recent performance/video 'Happy Christmas Mom & Dad', as exhibited in Spit Roast at Gallery 33.

Wilmot’s practice is concerned with the failure of perceived luxury settings to create paradise. Her distopian paintings explore the idea of fractured pleasure.

In the ‘Hotel’ series exhibited at Gallery 33 the hermetically sealed global interstitial spaces of five star hotels are presented as airless, oppressive and banal. In such environments architecture is used as a starting point for control of emotions and where fantasy always falls short.

Packed full of painterly devices; including drips and smears, the works are unsettling and often claustrophobic.

Although working in different media; Allen in video, Wilmot in paint both artists share a similar aesthetic; a fascination with the banality of contemporary life where everything has a price

Spit Roast opens at Gallery 33 on 16th February 2007 and closes 6th April 2007. Gallery hours: 11.00 – 1900 Monday to Friday, Saturday 11.00-16.00

For further information or photography contact:
Christa Mayke on +49 (0) 1778185295/+49 (0) 30 2809 9370
or via e-mail maykec@aol.com