Johnnie Dady, An Uncertain Object, 2011, installation image
An Uncertain Object continues Johnnie Dady’s exploration of hybridity in sculpture. For this new exhibition Johnnie Dady has fabricated improbable yet commonplace objects, things that just might work, or failing that, be returned to the scrapheap of invention. Barrow, for instance may well be a chair or a barrow, but it might also be a remodelled Duchampian readymade. According to the artist: The works are proposals or prototypes for things I imagine, but somehow they avoid being useful. Unsteady creations they may be, but Dady’s work is grounded in the Modernist principles of old, its love of invention and irreverence to the fore.
In his previous bodies of work Dady had taken to building faux antique furniture from nothing but humble corrugated cardboard sheets. Much like Picasso in his halcyon Cubist period, Dady plays with our sense of perception and reality. His third solo exhibition at Anna Pappas Gallery, An Uncertain Object will run from 11 May to 7 June, 2011.
