I don't go to enough artists talks but I'm glad I went to Open Eye at lunch time today to see Christopher Stewart talking about his work which opened today. I was at the private viewing last night but one never has time to really study the pictures and read the statements at these functions. I'll let Open Eye's press release explain what ts all about....

Since the mid-1990s, UK-based artist Christopher Stewart has worked on a series of projects that explore the shadowy world of the international security industry. Through this immediate subject matter, Stewart reflects upon some of the broader, emerging, consequences of globalisation. In the words of American urban theorist Mike Davis, “Stewart’s powerfully disorienting photographs detonate our Orwellian anxieties. They are preliminary studies in the banality of dystopia”.

‘Kill House’ (2005) is a series of photographs of a house in Arkansas, USA, that was built for the purpose of training private military personnel to clear domestic houses in conflict zones such as Iraq and Afghanistan. The deserted interiors resemble a grim stage-set constructed from scarred and smoke-damaged concrete and iron, punctuated by occasional, skeletal props of abandoned furniture. “The ‘architect’ of this building imagines a dystopian scenario, a polarised version of the American domestic house where form follows fear rather than function” (Christopher Stewart).

Stewart’s video installation ‘Levanter’ (2002) takes its name from a meteorological phenomenon that forms for a few days a year between Africa and Europe in the Straits of Gibraltar. The Levanter cloud envelops the summit of the Rock of Gibraltar and the military base that is built on it. Stewart’s video shows us a military surveillance/monitoring tower, shrouded in mist, and Levanter-obscured views down to the port, the Straits and the African coast. “The two images represent both the limits and the freedoms of globalisation: the need on the one hand for close monitoring and paranoia and on the other for free trade and freedom of movement of goods and people. The appearance of the Levanter seems to symbolically suggest the limitations of both enterprises” (Christopher Stewart).

At Open Eye until March 25th 2006