James Rigler : The Lost World
at Marsden Woo Gallery
London
The Marsden Woo Gallery is currently exhibiting the work of Royal College of Art alumni James Rigler in the exhibition The Lost World.
Rigler’s artefacts have a strange familiarity; they resemble things we know we’ve seen before, but find it hard to pinpoint where. Exaggerated and emphatic, each piece is a synthesis of historical forms and cultural ideas that carry with them a multiplicity of associations.
Architectural detail and domestic interiors have been important references for his recent work. The ceramic flowers are developments of the carved flora of architectural stonework; their washed-out orange and peach hues are inspired by illustrations of interiors found within books from the 1950s and 60s, books that he inherited from his architect grandfather. This palette of colours is curiously analogous to faded utopian dreams.
A stonework wall niche, held aloft on a pole, mixes an architectural feature with thoughts about the paraphernalia of folklore, the representations of ancient symbols still paraded during fête days in English market towns. It also manifests his predilection to take permanent things and make them portable. Indeed Rigler’s epic and puzzling scenarios are reminders of just how much our perception of normality in the material world depends on learned rules of classification.
James Rigler, installation shot, photo © Philip Sayer
