The Marquise Went Out at Five O?clock

Press Release

jotta’s platform for contemporary art practice, jottaContemporary, curates The Marquise Went Out at Five O’clock in partnership with Edel Assanti Project Space.

All the Kings Horses, a novel by Michele Bernstein, embodies a synthesis of contextual interpretations that continue to be used as cultural critique. Originally intended as an ironic and libertine novel to communicate the Situationist International movement, the diverse manifestations of the text over time reveal its influential social and historical observations layered within the guise of fiction. A deliberate provocation within Bernstein’s text, ‘The Marquise Went Out at Five O’clock’, functions as an arbitrary quote; it says nothing while leading to multiple meanings, thus exposing the operational motives of the literary text. All The Kings Horses provides this exhibition with a curious point of departure in which socio-political history is deconstructed through forthright prose, fictional satire, and art historical account.

The Marquise Went Out at Five O’clock showcases contemporary artistic practices influenced by the medium of documentation, renegotiating significant contextual references with fabrication. These artistic practices question the authority of the archive, whilst constructing potential meaning through representation in both found and photographic image. The artworks offer a dialogue that explores recollective memory and interpretative allegory, providing the viewer with a space in which to investigate the subjective image through differing eyes.

Adam Thomas, who has shown widely both in London and internationally, explores the visual dimension of language. Utilising an objective process of rendering cultural knowledge, his work disseminates nostalgia’s implication on contemporary and future constructs. In contrast, Jorge De la Garza, an MA graduate of Chelsea College of Art, layers found ephemera to form unsettling poetic narratives, which explore representation and image interpretation. Influenced by philosophical works on history and meaning, De la Garza’s work has been showcased throughout the UK including New Contemporaries, and Liverpool Biennial.

Selected artworks from Noemie Goudal’s series, Les Amants, explores dialectic imagery and the oppositional relationship between organic and man-made elements. A recent graduate in MA photography at the Royal College of Art and 2006 winner of D&AD Student of the Year Award, her latest series exploits the visual language of layered imagery, simultaneously questioning the narrative properties of the photographic medium.

Stuart Bailes identifies theatre as a dominant motif in his recent work and considers how its’ arena represents continually shifting scenes and context. Bailes, a recent graduate of MA photography at the Royal College of Art, considers his practice as ‘a play that writes itself’ and re-considers how history is determined through the unfolding of decisions and encounters. In parallel, Charlesworth, Lewandowski & Mann, an internationally exhibited artists collective, assemble a composite narrative within a video work which explores and interprets pivotal and dissipated alterations in history. With a voiceover taken from Wikipedia and images borrowed from Google, the work subverts reality and challenges the spectator to engage in acritical viewing of an unfamiliar history.