The Outsiders Newcastle kick off our 2012 program of exhibitions with a double-header - Prefab77's 'Lightning Strikes Twice' which takes place in the darkest recesses of the gallery at the same time as Alaric Hammond's 'Wonderland'.
Artists: Alaric Hammond
Location: The Outsiders - Newcastle
Dates: Friday 20th of January 2012 to Saturday 18th of February 2012
Upon arriving in London during the summer of 2000, Alaric Hammond quickly established a reputation for innovative image making and art direction. He soon found both like minds and a home for his talents within the highly influential Insect Collective, marking the start of a collaboration with founder Paul Insect that was to continue long after the studio closed in the final months of 2007. The most notable results of this are celebrated in the pairʼs abundant packaging and poster designs created for innovative hip-hop producer DJ Shadow.
Alaric's ʻWonderlandʼ exhibition (his debut) represents the death throes of Pop Art. “The laws of our society are fluid,” says the Newcastle-based artist, “and I believe the anxiety we feel right now is because weʼre looking for new answers. Iʼm appropriating Pop Art, which expressed those feelings at the start of the consumer societyʼs life cycle, and re-inventing it for the end of that era.” Employing a carnival of urban pop-trash imagery and marginalised characters, ʻWonderlandʼ wilfully appropriates and subverts the motifs and tactics of late twentieth century pop, challenging political and corporate artifice.
Hammond employs a variety of acid bath techniques to corrode the metal plates bearing his work for this show. No less than 450 different plates combine together to make the pieces in the show. The process dramatises an effect of decades of wear from the natural passage of time and weather, and the hand of man in the form of pollution and neglect. These meticulously-crafted plates then bear long-established icons of our age: Prozac anti-depressant pills, fast food, designer brands, stilettos, and cartoon characters bastardised to appear ripped to the tits on human growth hormone.
Embrace end times in a rictus of ecstasy at Alaric Hammondʼs ʻWonderlandʼ exhibition, taking place at The Outsiders Newcastle.
