BACKSLIDING

Union Gallery London 8 May - 20 July 2010

UNION Gallery is delighted to present a new body of work by British artist Charles Mason.

The large work of Charles Mason presented at UNION Gallery titled Backsliding, imposes itself in the room that houses it, sucking in the surrounding space in an overbearing manner, yet enticing its audience to take a virtual tour deep within themselves.

Ernest Holmes said “Life is a mirror and will reflect back to the thinker what he thinks into it.” and something of this seems to happen when we are faced with the works of Charles Mason, whose mirrored surfaces produce strange, shadowy reflections.

We find our image reflected in a shallow, airless space shared by strange concrete forms, forcing us to reconsider the perception we have of ourselves and of others whose reflections are similarly trapped in the dark space that engulfs us.

Backsliding used in Christianity to describe the condition of reverting to a time prior to conversion, a return to false idolatry and an indulgence in sin.

The optical effect of the three panels deployed in Backsliding (2010) is of a folding screen, hiding nothing, showing everything (and more) through a kaleidoscopic effect of multiple reflections. When the spectator’s body does not interfere, two twin ‘Things’ are mirrored, rather like Rita Hayworth and Orson Welles in the mirrored corridor of The Lady from Shanghai. The ‘Thing’ and we, its spectators, are creatures caught in a trap, living in a world of images, of forms and reflections on the border of day - dreams.

At once playful and unnerving, the articulated and curving forms can be contemplated through the Perspex sheets, a highly industrialized material that rebuffs us like a riot shield, shows us our reflection framed within the work, distorts our perception of reality and engenders a very particular way of looking.

Between you and me 2008, Perspex, concrete, galvanised steel and rubber

Backsliding 2010, Perspex, concrete, galvanised steel and rubber, 210 x 250 x 300 cm

Backsliding 2010 Installation view at Union gallery