Deborah Griffin – ‘The Pig Show’
Solo show of new & recent works
Opening Thursday 7pm October 7th 2010
Resistance Gallery 265 Poyser St, Bethnal Green, E29RF
From her performance roots in the punk-rock tradition of the anarchist-social-realism of playwright Chris Ward’s Wet Paint, and James Charlton’s Fireworks theatre companies in the 1980s, Deborah Griffin achieved iconic status on the London fetish scene from the late 80s throughout the 90s primarily with her cutting-edge and genre-defining work with photographer Trevor Watson.
Their collaborations, with Deborah centre-stage as model, muse and partner-in-crime with her edgy sexually and politically-charged character-play, documented this embryonic scene at a crucial defining stage of its development in a myriad of published books, magazine front-covers and fashion spreads, and has simply come to define what many people think of when they hear the word ‘fetish’.
‘Cover Star of Skin Two Magazine’
The same confrontational politic and exhilarating sense of fun and transgression now informs her current sculptural, installation and image-based art-work.
Deborah Griffin first exhibited at Resistance Gallery in 2008, in the inaugural group show ‘Resistance Rising’ and again in the ‘Iconography Of Mask’ show curated by Jason Atomic and Garry Vanderhorne in 2009, where she exhibited a mask made from the ashes of her own recently deceased father.
‘God Is Dad With A Mask On’
October 2010 at Resistance Gallery sees ‘The Pig Show’, Deborah’s first solo show which unveils five major new works alongside a number of previously exhibited pieces. Amongst the new works will be large installation-based sculptures, image-based work and paintings, thematically linked to the complex, paradoxical and hypocritical relationship we as humans have with animals, primarily pigs.
‘Pretty In Pig’
‘Go Ask Alice’
Pigs have historically been the brunt of many a joke and intellectually regarded as a kind of benchmark definition of where ‘animal’ ends and the far more elevated and upright ‘humanity’ begins. English philosopher John Stuart-Mill in his ‘Utilitarianism’ (1836) wrote “...Better to be a discontented Socrates than a contented pig”.
The relationship between what it means to be all-too human or fall fowl (sic) to our basest animal predisposition was never more explicitly laid at the trotters of our pig-cousins than by George Orwell in ‘Animal Farm’ (1945) “The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which”.
‘Working on a new piece’
The British Police have since their inception been referred to as ‘The Pigs”, the feminist movement in the 60s and ‘70s expended much energy exposing “Male-Chauvinist-Pigs” in society, as did left-wing movements worldwide throughout the century with “Fascist Pigs”.
Urban myth has long had it that, according to a variety of cannibal sources, human meat tastes “a bit like pork”.
Exhibition opens 7pm Thursday 7th Oct till Wednesday 27th Oct.
