David Stamp

REACH

16 - 21 October 2006, Glasgow Project Room.

View a Quicktime showing a section of both the Reach projections

David Stamp's practice is a contemporary investigation into the perennial question of identity that echoes much of our awkwardness and discomfort when presented with the limits of our own knowledge.

Addressing the notion of the artist's 'persona' through his recurring 'Wiseman' alter-ego, Stamp traverses a relationship to place and understanding that illustrates the gulf between received instruction and experienced ignorance with self-depreciating humour and an understated surrealism. Wiseman painfully stumbles his way through an often violent landscape as a tragic-comic expose of the human condition: to desire knowledge just as we know we will still be defeated by its limits.

As a character, Wiseman is routinely both personally wounded and impersonally vindicated. As an (almost) genuine incarnation of the amateaur explorer / hunter / naturalist, he bears as much resemblance to a Victorian armchair anthrolpologist at large as to Reality TVs glut of 'Wilderness Gurus'.

In Stamp's most recent work 'Reach', Wiseman faces his toughest challenge yet in a video that condenses many of the artist's concerns into a single imagined encounter: an epic showdown between Wiseman and the wilderness in the form of a giant rabbit. Who knows what the outcome might be.

The above text was written especially for the exhibition © RB 2006

This exhibition was kindly supported by: