Murray Guy is very pleased to announce an exhibition with Rosalind Nashashibi and Lucy Skaer.  This will be the first solo exhibition of their collaborative practice in the United States.

The works of Nashashibi / Skaer take up images and their divagations, as the artists probe cognitive and affective structures of knowledge and uncertainty.  This show will feature two recent film installations, Pygmalion Event and Our Magnolia, both of which invoke images that attempt to enact transformations among actors, objects, and contexts.

Pygmalion Event comprises two synchronized 16mm films that take up by indirection the allegory of the sculptor Pygmalion, who fell in love with a statue he was carving and willed it to life.  One channel shows a priest donning a series of fantastical colored vestments designed by Henri Matisse for the Chapelle du Rosaire de Vance.  The other collects a series of images: a sailboat, a coffee cup, arid cliffs, an orange, and a teenager gracefully turning in a park.  These pictograms appear at some moments to respond to the images of the priest’s transformations, as though they were the outward signs of his protestations of faith.   At other times, they seem to form an independent narrative, structured by a logic of associative thinking, as though it was an ordered daydream.

Our Magnolia is a single channel 16mm film that takes as its starting point Paul Nash’s extraordinary 1944 painting Flight of the Magnolia, conceived when the threat of a German invasion of England embued the sky with a new anxiety: the potential to blossom with explosions or parachutes.  The film intercuts details of Nash’s aerial magnolia with other images: actual magnolia blossoms, a whale skeleton languishing in the sands of a beach, a video of planes on a runway, footage of the response to the looting of Iraq’s National Museum, a man looking at a computer, and a desk with a progressively more haunting photograph of Margaret Thatcher.  Nash’s reparative picture becomes more and more menacing as the film constructs its “flight” amid other contexts, including Thatcherism and the Iraq War, which bring to mind Nash’s own paintings as an official war artist for the British during World War I and II.

Pygmalion Event was commissioned by Tate Britain.  Our Magnolia was commissioned by Doggerfisher, Edinburgh, with the support of the Scottish Arts Council Lottery Fund.

Rosalind Nashashibi (b. 1973 Croydon, UK) and Lucy Skaer (b 1975 Cambridge, UK) have collaborated under the moniker Nashashibi / Skaer since 2005.  Their work is currently on view in Jones, Koester, Nashashibi/Skaer: Reanimation at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, and in the traveling exhibition For the blind man in the dark room looking for the black cat that isn’t there, which originated at the Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis.  Recent exhibitions include Art Now: Pygmalion Event at the Tate Britain, London (2008); Pygmalion Workshop, CAC Bretigny, France (2008); and When Things Cast No Shadow – The 5^th Berlin Biennial (2008).   Both Skaer and Nashashibi have also exhibited extensively as individual artists.  Nashashibi won the Beck’s Futures prize in 2003, and Skaer was short-listed for the Turner Prize in 2009.  Skaer is currently a resident at Location One, New York, where she will have a solo exhibition later this year.