Tuesday 30 October 2012

Daniel AGDAG - "Sets for a Film l’ll never make"

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                                                         Empire Building
                                                                                           Image courtesy of artist and Off the Kerb Gallery
                                                       The Wait
                                                       Image Courtesy of artist and Off the Kerb Gallery

This latest exhibition at Off the Kerb Gallery is the first solo show for artist Daniel Agdag.
The title of the show adeptly describes the thread of each of these five intricately made works. As you walk into the gallery, you could mistakenly have entered a curiosity shop blended with the fantasia of writer Ronald Dahl and the surrealism of director Tim Burton.

At first greeted by the most robust and largest of the works is Amalgamated, a setting of an historical building site with warped nuances only viewed after further investigation. It looks to be a scene from a New York street or busy metropolis. All complete with a W class tram morphed with American cable cars. Created with cardboard that has been manipulated, rolled, flatten, cut and moulded. The attention to detail is spectacular and to think such a heavy laded piece could be light in weight boggles the mind. The architecture of the work is brilliantly composed and obviously researched.

The other works stand in glass domes presented on plinths pertaining to museum kept artefacts of a distant era.  The Wait is the most delicate of the pieces, which resembles an old hot air balloon warped slightly with the experimental makings of a machine. The glass dome protects this prototype with its transparent and delicate balloon as though it will deflate at any given moment if an insect would land on its surface.

These small sets expose the viewer to the artists imagined industrial estate. Far from the modern unsavoury factories and large corrugated sheds. A small wonderland of obscurities.

Until 9th of November