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John Rainey | Flayground

Past exhibition
7 November - 14 December 2019
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Overview
John Rainey | Flayground

Flayground is a collection of new and retrospective work by John Rainey. His most recent sculptures, which form the core of Flayground, are a series of variations of the Doryphoros by the Ancient Greek master sculptor Polykleitos. Polyskeitos's bronze original is long lost; and so Rainey's sculptures are informed by later Roman marble copies, or even later plaster casts. They are copies copying other copies: manufactured fragments featuring faux breakage and cloned limbs, held upright by structures reminiscent of museum displays (or playgrounds).

 

Rainey created this work following a six-month fellowship at the British School at Rome, where he cast his net of interest in "the copy" wide, to draw on sources ranging from the film sets of Cinecittà ('Cinema City') and the excavated bodies at Pompeii, to the flayed skin of St. Bartholomew in Michelangelo's "The Last Judgement". The skins that adorn Rainey's Doryphorus copies – pushed up, pulled down or removed entirely – reveal that the figures are bound in a system of pretending to be something other. They exaggerate the imitation that lies at the heart of the copy.

 

In the initial section of Flayground, similar themes are traced through Rainey's work over the last eight years. Much of this work was inspired by our move to the virtual world; by our second selves presented on online platforms. There is a detectable preoccupation with things being not as they seem, and a co-option of familiar forms (often with classical reference) into a matrix of illusion, disruption and stress. Materials are coaxed into behaving or appearing in ways that disrupt our expectations: porcelain masquerades as silicone, silicone as porcelain, and forms that we recognize as decorative and static mutate and sprout bodily appendages. These are objects that hint at the plasticity of digital culture and its ability to challenge the natural order of things – alien, yet remaining familiar enough to unsettle.

 

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Installation Views
  • Img 1578
  • Img 1597
  • Img 1571
  • John Rainey Pushed Up Travertine And Aftermath Trunks Parian Porcelain And Steel 2019
Works
  • John Rainey, Copia Romana: Fragmented, 2019
    John Rainey, Copia Romana: Fragmented, 2019
  • John Rainey, The Fall of a Connection, 2014
    John Rainey, The Fall of a Connection, 2014
  • John Rainey, Counterflay, 2019
    John Rainey, Counterflay, 2019
  • John Rainey, Copia Romana: Rolled Back, 2019
    John Rainey, Copia Romana: Rolled Back, 2019
Press
  • John Rainey | Review in Dagens Nyheter

    Birgitta Rubin, "John Rainey roar sig rått med historien", December 11, 2019
Related content
  • Press

    John Rainey | Review in Dagens Nyheter

    "John Rainey roar sig rått med historien" Dec 11, 2019
    'I stort är detta en både spirituell och skickligt genomförd totalinstallation, där John Raineys dynamiska lek med historien leder rakt in en komplex nutid.' Read...
    Read more

Related artist

  • John Rainey

    John Rainey

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