Alex Michon visits the seaside to see an exhibition that references the jubilee celebrations and finds herself doing the time warp again!
So, with the Union Jack bunting beginning to fray and the gimcrack, knick-knackery gathering rust in the dusty corners of the souvenir stores, it’s time to look back on the jubilee-ing hoopla with a wry and discerning eye.
This is exactly what the exhibition Off With Their Heads attempted to do at the Don't Walk Walk Gallery in Deal. In keeping with its seaside location, many of the works on show featured affectionate end-of-the pier comedic elements. Two prints entitled Acid Reign by Neil Kelly and Cheer Up Love by Kelda Storm, with their rave and punk culture aesthetics served as irreverent antidotes to the forelock-tugging, cream tea-ing of the official celebrations.
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| Neil Kelly, Acid Reign, 2022, limited edition print on William Turner paper |
Irreverence appears to be woven into Don’t Walk Walk’s walls considering that two of Britain’s most iconoclastic comedians, namely Vic Reeves and Noel Fielding, regularly choose to exhibit here. Fielding presented a series of affectionate oil on stick drawings of her majesty including: The Queen on the Moon, The Queen Riding her Pet Flamingo Donovan and Little Queenie (showing a now familiar diminutive version of her majesty standing next to a rather large guardsman). Jim Moir (aka Vick Reeves), whimsical as ever, showed an original watercolour of Queen Victoria having a Paint Ball Experience. Certainly nothing to frighten Liz’s adored horses here!
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| Noel Fielding, Queen on the Moon, 2022, oil stick on paper, 42x29cm |
Fabienne Jenny Jacquet’s series of six oil paintings entitled Queens Head I-VI were some of the most engaging works in the show. Jacquet’s over embellished thickly painted portraits did not specifically reference the all too familiar image of the queen herself. Rather they stood in as queen manqués, with only Queen III having a vague resemblance to Elizabeth II. With their colourful top-heavy hairstyles resplendent with what appear to be paint rolls of flowers, their ornate drop earrings and grimacing smiles, they brought to mind ambiguous 18th Century grotesques. These portraits, replaying a painterly historicity reminiscent of Marie Antoinette, not only hinted at the darker side of monarchy but, as the faces got increasing obliterated by paint in each subsequent iteration, they also appeared to comment on the constant rehashing of queenly reproductions.
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| Fabienne Jenny Jacquet, Queens Head VI, III, II, 2022, oil on paper, 41x33cm |
Elsewhere in the exhibition several works took a broader view of the subject to include aspects of British Culture. Neil Kelly’s melancholic painting Shit Picnic recalls a typical day remembered from the artist’s childhood of a picnic embarked on during a gloomy British summers day with a pylon standing in for a tree and a desolate blanket laid out ready for the festivities to begin. Not so much of a lovely jaunt in a green and pleasant land as a cheap holiday on the outskirts of town. This idea is further explored in Vanessa Smith’s Farewell to this Lands Cheerless Marshes. Smith is well known for her paintings of uninhabited interiors, imbued with an eerie tension. Her deceptively glossy pink interior opens up its secrets on subsequent viewing; fondant fancies on the table, a desolate drinks cupboard and some kind of disaster on TV hint at a particular feeling of ennui common to many a suburban British sitting room.
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| Vanessa Smith, Farewell to This Land's Cheerless Marches, 2022, oil & acrylic on canvas, 50x70cm |
With strikes on the increase, a looming oil crisis, a corrupt government in power and Pistol streaming on Disney+, this jubilee feels like a re-imagining of 1977. In that long hot summer of discontent when the bunting fluttered, and the filth and the fury was unleashed onto screaming tabloid headlines because some ne’er-do-wells had sworn on TV, the backdrop was the truly shocking image of her majesty with a safety pin through her nose. Here’s hoping that Danny Boyle’s Pistol will inspire some contemporary youthful rebellion. Even though Off With Their Heads alluded to all this, the shock of lese majesty has dimmed with time. Let’s face it, we all love Her Maj really. God Save the Queen, after all remember it is not her that ‘made you a moron’ it was just this bloody fascist regime!
Alex Michon
Off With Their Heads
Don't Walk Walk Gallery, Deal, Kent
2-12 June 2022