Karen Ryan - Custom Made in England, Vanity series - seen here
I like Karen Ryan's work very much, and I wish I could get down to London in time to see the show she is in at Spring Projects called Straw Dogs - it finishes on 30 July so I'll miss it.
The exhibition includes Jason Brooks, Jake & Dinos Chapman and Hans Stofer and is a response the philosopher John Gray's 2003 book Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals. This book has been a major influence for me in the last few years and I used it as the basis of my essay for a Philosophy of Art module I took trough Cardiff Centre of Lifelong Learning in 2008. It is a bleak view which questions Humanist ideas of progress and suggests that the impetus to understand the world in terms of linear progression is a hangover of Christian theology. He suggests that the drive towards constant improvement has created a paradigm of greed and dislocation from the natural world which has brought us to the brink of self destruction.
Gray has been criticised for his bleak approach to his subject, and he is hard to read and come out unaffected, but I feel there is some very important issues for the art world to consider in his ideas. So, I am doubly upset that I won't get to see this show!
