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Are You Our Missing Winner?
Adam Latham


TAKE COURAGE GALLERY
388 New Cross Road
London
13/3/09 - 19/3/09
P.V. Thursday 12th March 2009 6:00pm


Take Courage proudly presents Adam Latham’s new solo exhibition, Are you our missing winner? The exhibition comprises of an installation in which the walls of the gallery space are covered by brightly coloured shimmer curtains, gently swaying in the breeze created by an oscillating fan. The motion created by the fan is accentuated by a soundtrack of instrumental versions of songs from the 1949 musical South Pacific, re-recorded by exotica group The Surfmen in the early 1960s. The central focus of the exhibition is a separate panel of purple shimmer curtains set away from the wall slightly. Autonomous from the surrounding curtains the panel becomes an object in its own right somewhere between a stage backdrop and a canvas. The fan and a congratulatory bouquet of flowers also act as sculptural objects breaking up the space of the exhibition.

The title of the exhibition, with its lure of the possibility of personal gain, sets the scene for two new poster-drawings in the style of vintage holiday advertisements inviting the viewer to ‘be a winner in Hawaii’ or suggesting that ‘If you don’t like where you live you should move’. Through evocation of ideas of leisure, aspiration and sensory indulgence as manifested in a hallucinatory exotic environment, Latham examines the complex mechanics connecting fantasy and consumerism. The pictorial-symbolic logic of advertising is shown to become surreal or uncanny when divorced from its commercial function.

Latham’s work is endearingly humorous and grimly repulsive in equal measure. It takes on a broad range of source material: adverts, cartoons, propaganda, as well as the work of artists as diverse as Archimbaldo, Gauguin and Robert Crumb. In his referencing of examples of kitsch, pop and folk culture, Latham looks at how they are uprooted and mythologized within the contemporary liberal pluralist hegemony. The work unearths what is repressed in these present-day appropriations: currents of fear and desire that come to life as obscene, grotesque and taboo imagery.

Nicetits Shameabouttheface

2005
ink on paper
40x60cm

Hut

2005
Gloss on Board
183x183cm

Heather

2006
ink on paper
60 x 80 cm

We Gat Binanas

2008
ink and watercolour on paper
42 x 60

If You Dont Like Where You Live You Should Move

2009
ink and Watercolour on paper
42x 60 cm

Ambition's F' Them what Can Afford It

2008
ink and Watercolour on paper
30 x 40 cm

Holiday Man

2008
coloured pencil on paper
60x84cm

Be A Winner In Hawaii

2009
ink and Watercolour on paper
50x65cm

Put It Out

2008
watercolour on paper
50 x 40 cm

If Y' Can't Fight Good Fight Dirty

2007
ink and watercolour on paper
40 x 60 cm

Make Poverty History(Burn The Bastards)

2008
Poster
100x150cm

Sulphur Blue

2008
Ink and watercolour on Paper
60 x 60 cm

A Godless And Miserable Lump of Rock

2008
Ink and watercolour on Paper
42 x 60 cm

Arrietta

2008
ink on paper
60 x 84 cm

desserted hut

2006
gloss and fairy lights on board
183 x 183 cm