Headless Times is a two-person exhibition of new work in drawing, painting, and sculpture by Kathleen McShane and Liz Rodda.
L'homme a échappé à sa tête comme le condamné à la prison.
Man escaped from his head like the condemned man from his prison.
-Georges Bataille, La Conjuration Sacrée, 1936
Kathleen McShane and Liz Rodda share an affinity for grammatical infrastructure, a syntax of landscape and form. Their baseline: the vast tableau of the west and the accreted material detritus of contemporary culture. Sly and referential, their work in painting, drawing, sculpture and video finds its expository capabilities enlivened through the shared framework of collage.
In 1936 philosopher Georges Bataille and his peers founded the journal Acéphale (headless) to propound a break from rationalism and advance new mythologies centered on freedom and radical experience. This exhibition, Headless Times, offers up a fresh opportunity to reconfigure meaning in the face of irreconcilable atrocity, a suggestion that to-get-out-of-ones-head need not be an abnegation but is instead an opportunity for liberation from forces of power that seek to separate us from our bodily selves, an artistic revolt staged in service of the ecstatic: an etymological step outside of reason.
Images: Alex Barber