Legend Trip – Alison Gill

17th May – 16th June 2012

Over a period of two decades Alison Gill has developed a diverse practice, which tries to extend beyond the limits of contemporary art, reaching out to areas such as folklore and psychoanalysis as well as other fields of knowledge. In her exhibition here at the Charlie Dutton Gallery, Gill will continue to push these boundaries by presenting new drawing and sculpture related to the Legend Trip phenomenon and the Voyage and Return narrative. These themes involve the pursuit of self-knowledge, encounters with the metaphysical and reflect on the manner by which our lives are enriched and encircled by the imaginary.

Legend Trip explores and celebrates the apparent folly of inexperience, examining the enduring reverberations of rites of passage and voyage and return templates, as reflected in western youth-culture and often re-activated at significant stages of life. Gill questions whether the desire to test one’s mortality (by various means) and to outwit it, still has a currency in our present unstable times. In registering the dangers and pleasures of romancing such a metaphysical possibility Gill seems to highlight that to take such a risk, that of loosing oneself to the unknown, may be a necessary act to provide an imaginative way into other-worlds beyond the everyday.