In his latest series Graham Dolphin has scratched swathes of text into the printed face of advertising posters, entire books from the King James Bible fall fluidly across the skin of both the poster and the model contained within. In scratching and removing the printed ink, revealing the paper beneath, Dolphin’s minute white text magnifies the poster’s image, somehow enlarging the figure within, as it crawls across the flawless mouth, eyes and skin. Examining the works closely, the image dissolves into its CYMK components, and you notice the visible registration marks, and that the poster curls at the edges; its apparent that the work is a re-appropriated object rather than a purpose made image, underlining the hours of punitive, monastic labour involved. Markedly different from previous works, such as the scratched records, whose form was rigidly dictated by the production process, these new works have a languid air of near menacing eroticism as the text drips from the reclining models eyes, defacing the perfect skin beneath.
Alongside the object based work are two new video pieces further examining this ground. In Gisele Blend, 2008 hundreds of images of the model Gisele dissolve slowly into each other, where the original becomes lost as they melt into one another. Deformed six eyed versions of the ubiquitous model gaze longingly at the viewer. This work follows on from Dolphin’s work 1500 images of Kate Moss in 60 seconds, in appropriating images of hyper-visible figures. Downstairs in the gallery’s black space Requiem, 2008 also manipulates and builds with existing source material. Six frames, each containing a 10 minute section of the hour long Requiem in D Minor, by Mozart, performed by the Berliner Philharmoniker, are projected in a crucifix shape upon a black background. In treating this source material as a found object and overlaying it in a very simple way, Dolphin produces a new thing, a kind of aural collage, changing the structured sound into something overpowering, with a very different meaning.
Graham Dolphin, 6 Sheet installation view, 2008
Graham Dolphin, Chloe Proverbs (Chapters 1-15), Chloe Proverbs (Chapters 16-34), 2008
Scratched advertising poster
Graham Dolphin, Dior Deuteronomy (Chapters 16-34), 2008
135 x 190 cm
Scratched advertising poster
Graham Dolphin, Installation View, 2008
Graham Dolphin, Guerlain Mark, 2008 (detail)
Scratched advertising poster
188 x 132 cm
Graham Dolphin, Dior Deuteronomy (Chapters 1-16), 2008
Scratched advertising poster
72 x 48 inches
Guerlain Mark, 2008 (detail)
Scratched advertising poster
188 x 132 cm
Graham Dolphin, Gisele Blend, 2008
Digital animation
17 mins