Dean Clough Galleries in collaboration with PAPER & CHARLIE SMITH LONDON present:
Semiotic Guerrilla Warfare (part III)

Hermione Allsopp / Jemima Brown / Andrea Cotton / Lisa Denyer / Frances Disley / Tracey Eastham / Zavier Ellis / Sarah Eyre / David Hancock / Florian Heinke / Phill Hopkins / Hilde Krohn Huse / Sam Jackson / Monica Ursina Jäger / Vincent James / Chris Jones / Simon Leahy Clark / Richard Meaghan / James Moore / Alex Gene Morrison / Narbi Price / Conor Rogers / Mitra Saboury / Jenny Steele / Pär Strömberg / Zhu Tian / Lisa Wilkens / Simon Woolham / Hannah Wooll / Rachel Wrigley / THE CULT OF RAMM:ΣLL:ZΣΣ featuring Yang Younghee

Semiotic Guerilla Warfare marks a new collaboration between CHARLIE SMITH LONDON and PAPER presented in The Link Gallery at Dean Clough. The artists assembled create artwork from any materials that come to hand; creating a theoretical collage of themes: linguistics, text, the city, psychogeography, found images, appropriation, youth / underground culture, networks, cults / rituals. Exploring popular culture in an attempt to de-value the art object and elevate everyday objects. Semiotic Guerrilla Warfare presents found objects, mass-produced materials, and a lo-fi aesthetics to create a new visual language that comments upon the disposable nature of our culture and society.

The purchase of commodities can be seen to offer a sense of freedom and an escape. By manipulating and appropriating high street fashions youth subcultures create a unique identity and transform themselves into street art. These concepts might be equally applied to artists, who use appropriation in their art to subvert the meaning of the subjects that they transform. This creative use of commodities is exploited for the purpose of resistance, altering the meaning of a chosen mass produced object through the concept of bricolage. This cultural appropriation or theft and transformation of a commodity highlights each of these artists as conspicuous consumers. Dick Hebdige, the subcultural theorist, quoting Umberto Eco, describes these subversive practices as “semiotic guerrilla warfare”; raiding the dominant culture for their trophies. These commodities are desired simply because they are status symbols of the privileged. They are essentially “empty fetishes”, desired and appropriated from those that are their antithesis. These artists essentially adopt the lifestyles they appropriate, employing their visual language to subvert the meaning of the very images they incorporate into their work.

The exhibition contains individual works from internationally renowned artists such as Chris Jones, Jemima Brown, Florian Heinke, Phill Hopkins, and John Moore’s prizewinner, Narbi Price. Alongside these, there is a series of portraits of Black Metal Girls by Swedish artist, Pär Strömberg. These young women, mainly girls from catholic backgrounds, use the machoistic iconography of Black Metal to make a statement; claiming the subculture as their own. In portraying their ‘selfies’ in Watercolour, Strömberg hopes to evaluate their status within the tropes of Romanticism. The avant-garde cyber Hip Hop performance art group, The Cult of RAMM:ΣLL:ZΣΣ, present <The Book of Bitumen>, a residue recording the Cults’ live street performance rituals. Alongside these, will be a new series of intricate sculptural works by Tracey Eastham. Presented in bell jars, Eastham cuts exquisite detail in suspended fine gold paper.
The Artists:
Hermione Allsopp
Dream Roller
Photographic Collage
12.5 x 19.5cm
2015

Hermione Allsopp creates photographic collage using objects from domestic interiors found in charity shops.  These objects carry collective attachments, memories and meanings as part of our material culture and its history. Allsopp creates a shift in perception: partial, recognizable objects are altered to reflect the way memory and meaning are fractured, reshaped or reformed in a visual exploration of the duality of body and mind; of interior and exterior and of object and space.
Jemima Brown
Untitled Wife
Acrylic, pan scourer, plastics, ribbon and pampas grass on Paper
29 x 21cm
2015
Andrea Cotton
Contraband
Red Pen on Paper
29 x 21cm
2015
Andrea Cotton's work is about obsession, particularly when born out of boredom or institutionalisation, and the processes in which such circumstances arise. She employs the process of undertaking a monotonous task and the ennui of prison life (witnessed as a teacher within an institution) into pieces of artwork that raise questions and demand a new look at what exactly goes on in such places. Contraband reproduces a sign found within the prison meticiously copied in red biro.
Lisa Denyer
Pylon
Collage with acrylic and emulsion
30x21cm

2015
Lisa Denyer's work is a reinterpretation of visual details. Denyer is interested in both calculated and unintentional interventions. She uses repurposed materials for aesthetic qualities and for their connotations of transience. Denyer's process incorporates collage, allowing for wide scale experimentation with compositional elements. Her work explores matter, materiality and changing states. Pylon references ideas around modernity whilst also alluding to ruination and antiquity. The abstract nature of the piece renders its symbolism open to interpretation; however, consideration of dystopian narratives and the unattainable or unsustainable is invited.
Frances Disley
Loop 
plywood, achival digital print on somersert satin paper, acrylic paint, gloss paint and yacht varnish
21 x 29cm
2015
Frances Disley is an artist indicative of the concept bricolage. Disley creates bold, lurid sculptures using duct tape, electrical tape, and a variety of adhesives and epoxy resins. Disregarding the functional purpose of these materials, she creates compositions based purely on the formal possibilities inherent to these materials. The materials are then pushed into further formats: photography, digital printing, and painting, where function continues to be disregarded. What emerges are hybrid works that sit uncomfortably between states. 
Tracey Eastham
Unremembered Pleasure
Paper in glass bell jar
40 x 28cm

2015
Tracey Eastham makes intricate collages that bring together separate and often disparate photographic images of ruins to explore the intertextuality of landscape.  These images of ruins can be linked to the management and interpretation of landscape as a function of consumerism and tie into the wider cultural structures of national or political identity or nationhood.  The collages both critique this function and in some ways embrace it as a beguiling part of contemporary culture.
Zavier Ellis
Mad Preacher Drawing #1
Pencil on Paper
21 x 17cm
2014
Zavier Ellis combines the use of image and text with painterly, collage, assemblage, drawing and photographic techniques. Language is employed to obfuscate and open new possibilities. Street signs, misspelt graffiti, literature, coded language and obsessed over words are referenced by etching, collaging or painting. Image is used to refer directly or obliquely to Ellis’ research topics. The content draws on various intellectual interests, either fleeting or ongoing, including historical events; revolutionary politics; nationalism; art history; myth & magic; religion; and insanity.
Sarah Eyre
Penetralia #4
Photograph (Giclèe print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag Fine Art paper 310 gsm)
28.5 x 18 cm
Edition of 10 (+ 5 artist’s proofs)
2015

Sarah Eyre's work investigates the discarded wig as an object in its own right. Photographing abandoned wigs collected around Manchester’s red light district, Eyre uses techniques such as cutting, folding, and reassembling to signify an unravelling of the photographic image. These gestures literally open up the surfaces of the wig - creating playful relationships between interior and exterior, and generating new spaces where new meanings can be explored. These fragile paper experiments hint at the flimsy surfaces that make up the masquerade of femininity and further explore notions of the surreal and uncanny in these loaded everyday objects
David Hancock
Antimony (Pentagram)
Watercolour on Paper
28.5 x 25cm
2015

Antimony is a pastel goth. She feels black on the inside, but wants to present an outward appearance of something more colourful, more pastel. Antimony questions whether ponies, baby pink, or rainbows can soothe her black satanic heart.
Florian Heinke
System of Diplomatic Chaos Paradise Overdosed
Oil Pastel on Paper
29 x 42cm
2015
Another description of democracy. Democracy as the basic of a daily, not uncrictical handling of each other. Thesis – antithesis, this conflict and the quarrel with each other ideally ends in a solution that is an improvement for all. Florian Heinke's work points at the impossibility of a peaceful togetherness and our everlasting will to achieve it nonetheless. The dedication and the belief in artistic work in general and in contradiction to that the noise of a world that is only interrested in money and less in ideals. A society needs both: the backpedalling, the search for the ideal and to the same extent the protest and the rubbing against to get closer and closer to the ideal.
Phill Hopkins
Wrapped in Foil (Syria)
Blackboard paint, sticky-backed foil, emulsion paint, gloss paint, spray paint, varnish,used paintbrush handles, pin and Risperidone tablets on Fabriano 100/100 cotton paper.
20.2 x 28.4 cm

2015
Phill Hopkins has a voracious appetite for world news and the situations that we as human beings find ourselves subject to. He is interested in how we process global images of conflict that we receive into the domestic. Hopkins uses very ordinary materials, often found or bought at the hardware shop. In Wrapped in Foil (Syria), he has added-in other found materials from the floor of his studio.
Hilde Krohn Huse
Walking with Mr. Sutcliffe
Graphite on Paper
15 x 21cm
2015
Hilde Krohn Huse's Walking with Mr. Sutcliffe is a drawing of a screenshot of a documentary from YouTube on Peter Sutcliffe, Yorkshire Ripper. The content of these documentaries is in stark contrast with the comfort in which she watches them, far from the original content of the image. The image is removed from the tragedy with time and information lost through the process of interviewing. It is then edited to serve the agenda of the documentary makers and further abstracted from the original events, when it is neatly packaged via digital transfer into our homes and personal lives for entertainment. The only hint of the insidious origins, is the black structure in the foreground, surrounding the walking figures as they stroll along the beach. They speak about the 11 victims and the fear that strangled the community at the time, all unbeknownst to the audience who are just watching two people on an idle stroll.
Sam Jackson
THIS IS NO PERMISSION
Oil on Paper
25 x 28cm
2015

Sam Jackson's work investigates how a message encoded in one culture and decoded in another entails aberrant decoding, by looking to utillise tactical freedom in the matter of decoding on the content rather than the expression plane of the message. Punk sub –culture/sub-culture is investigated due to the innovation with existing cultural objects and the assignment of new sign-values over old meanings. The work embraces ‘poaching’ in which the expression-message is redefined and recontextualized but most importantly actually reformulated. Playing with presupposed codes from both ends the work seeks to pull the 'bottom' up to the 'top’. 
Monica Ursina Jäger
Realignment 02
ink on inkjet collage on Hahnemuehle paper
40 x 30cm
2015
Monica Ursina Jäger’s practice revolves around our natural and constructed environment: as real social sites and 
culturally 
embedded notions of public and private space. Her drawings form a complex cosmos of fictional topographiesand combine hope and downfall: on one hand designers’ aspirations, and fantasies, for the future; on the other the 
dystopia of failure. By recontextualising those images Jäger investigates customary patterns of perception and 
attribution, constantly transferring them to new 
contexts.
Vincent James
Hot Potato
Ink on Paper Cut-out
21 x 29cm
2015
Chris Jones 
Odd Lot
Magazine images, board, polymer varnish
30 x 15 x 15cm
2015
Chris Jones’ three-dimensional collages are made from the pages of used magazines and encyclopedias. Layers of these everyday images are reconstituted to form phantasmic realities that negotiate the real and the fictional.
Simon Leahy-Clark
Makeshift I
newspaper cuttings on canvas
150cm x 190cm 
2014

Simon Leahy-Clark creates large-scale images, pieced together from the constituent parts of daily press images. Leahy-Clark re-assembles these into a new overall image constructed from tiny pieces of world news: whether a distant massacre or plane crash, each image is dissected and reformed into a bland aspirational image. The act of looking remains in flux; flicking between the main image and its assembled parts. Leahy-Clark’s interest is in the possibility of everyday materials and ephemera and the exploration if the inherent qualities of these non-traditional materials in order to consider the process of drawing, painting and image making. The images themselves include makeshift camps - a kind of bricolage made of necessity where found material and objects will make do as a living space. 
Richard Meaghan
The Acheiropoieta
Oil on Paper
42 x 29cm
2015

Richard Meaghan, on the other hand, assembles narratives from the continuous stream of political corruption. Creating a dystopian future born from his imagination, thoughts, and inventions, his surreal meanderings are manifested in oil and graphite. Meaghan's thoughts take on an evolutionary journey from ancient history and theology to ideas of globalization, control and political agenda. The resulting characters are an eternally recurring cast of players, enacting repugnant Machiavellian machinations.
James Moore
Unplugged 
Oil on Paper
29 x 42cm
2015
Though James Moore might produce highly detailed Photo-realistic images, meticulously rendered in oil paint. His work employs a cut and paste aesthetic, assembling collaged images from a whole range of sources: computer games, film stills, models and photographs. Forming a surreal hybrid, these painted images act as a simulacra more than a representation - a copy of something where the original has become lost in layers of representation amongst the endless flow of images that we experience daily.
Alex Gene Morrison
Abstract Anti-Hero
watercolour, gouache and pen on paper
29 x 21cm
2015
Paintings of totemic abstract forms, skulls, forests and monsters aim to call to mind the primitive and tribal. Signifiers of fire and raw electrical energy relate to thoughts of destruction, transformation and re-animation via elemental forces. Concepts of archetypal elements that abridge modern and primeval man recur in the work. Formalist tropes that were defined by 20th century movements including Suprematism, Vorticism and Abstract Expressionism are absorbed and remixed via obsessions with horror and sci-fi movies; video games; sub cultural design; alternative music and the rhythms of Doom Metal. 
Narbi Price
Flowers I
Watercolour & Ink on Paper
21 x 29cm
2015
Conor Rogers
Come ova ere n tek my job
Acrylic on Found Lottery Ticket
10 x 6cm (26x23cm framed)
2015

Conor Rogers creates a visual narrative centred on a particular item of detritus. Painting directly onto found objects such as beer mats, cigarette packets, and scratch cards, Conor Rogers’ photo-realistic depictions of everyday life emerge from an ‘argument’ between the illusionism of the image and the substrate of the paintings. Roger’s relates the object and images, creating a visual pun of irreverent humour. His images are direct, reflecting his brash youthfulness. The discarded object, often grimy or torn, is elevated through the laborious process of the miniaturist. Using a single strand brush, the found objects display their entwined narratives transforming them into a treasured found item.
Mitra Saboury
Inverted Finger
Watercolour on Paper
25 x 20cm
2015
Mitra Saboury’s work investigates the consumption of her body by the environment. Through various media, Saboury fuses the body with elements that reveal the structure of influence on behavior. Her presence is felt as she immerses herself and all senses, confronting physical restrictions and confinements intimately. With Inverted Finger, the function and form of nail and finger are transposed, creating a figure that is both absurd and visceral.
Jenny Steele
The Settlers
Screenprint on Paper
6 x 7.5cm
2014

Jenny Steele’s practice explores the relationships between our occupation of digital space and physical space, their corresponding architectures, and our suggested movement within these spaces.
Pär Strömberg 
BMG #17
Watercolour on Paper
31 x 23cm
2015

Swedish artist, Pär Strömberg, (a pioneer of the Scandinavian Black Metal scene) appropriates the imagery of Romanticism alongside the iconography of Satanism. Brought up in rural Sweden where Christian values permeated his youth, Black Metal offered a form of rebellion that infected the morals of Christian society, even turning a small number of participants into arsonists and murderers. Rebellion and an anti-everything mentality inspire Strömberg’s practice and he continually draws from this period in his youth. For a subculture so male-centric, Strömberg has chosen to focus upon the female participants. These young women, mainly girls from catholic backgrounds, use the machoistic iconography of Black Metal to make a statement, hashtagging themselves within social media as #blackmetalgirls and claiming the subculture as their own. In portraying their ‘selfies’ in Watercolour, Strömberg hopes to evaluate their status within the tropes of Romanticism. 
Zhu Tian 
The Tyre Shop: 348 High Road Leyton
Inkjet Print on Paper
Edition of 3
29 x 21cm
2015
With utterly unexpected forms, Zhu Tian challenges and subverts conventions, imagines narratives that are both humorous and poetic, and pertains directly to the horrifying difference between presence and absence. The Tyre Shop: 348 High Road Leyton, is a found street graffiti at the titular address near where the artist lives in East London. It has been discovered, taking out of its context, interpreted, deconstructed then re-constructed and presented to you – secondhand viewers, as a new creation. 
Lisa Wilkens
False Dream
Chinese Ink on Paper
29 x 21cm
2015
Simon Woolham
Saving my Cousin
Biro on Paper
21 x 29cm
2015
Simon Woolham’s work is concerned primarily with occupied spaces and the narratives that unfold in them, in an attempt to unearth and perform unpredictable and fragile processes. Through these glimpses of narrative, the human details, often dilapidated environments come to life in a skint version of enchantment: a tree stump or a broken fence, are filled with the meanings of the events that go on around and about them.
Hannah Wooll
Haven
Acrylic and ink on found image
14 x 18cm
2015

Hannah Wooll paints upon the surfaces of books, wallpaper samples, and forgotten charity shop oddments. By appropriating items that contain a bygone sense of female aspiration, Wooll incorporates the images from these coffee table books to suggest or inspire the subject and technique. Her paintings are layered, creating a narrative of characters inhabiting these erstwhile worlds depicted within their pages. Her images appear spliced and assembled amongst page’s contents, working with or against them, transforming and highlighting their meaning. With that happenstance, the finished piece is never premeditated, yet remains retained within the page of the book: conjoining surface and the beautiful bastardised image.
Rachel Wrigley
Curve
Folded magazine page
15 x 10 x 5cm
2016

Rachel Wrigley takes the pages from a variety of aspirational interior design magazines, and uses these to create sculptural objects that reconstruct the notion of dimensional space. By manipulating, deconstructing, and distorting the architecture and objects that are documented within, Wrigley attempts to invent new forms; providing a distorted version of reality by investigating space as a moveable, impermanent fixture. The impermanence of her paper forms are both at odds with the structures depicted, yet reference the fleeting nature of fashion and consumer culture.
THE CULT OF RAMM:ΣLL:ZΣΣ featuring Yang Younghee
<The Book of Bitumen>
Mixed Media + DVD
20 Minutes
2015​​​​​​​
The centre piece of the exhibition will be <The Book of Bitumen> by The Cult of RAMM:ΣLL:ZΣΣ, an avant-garde cyber Hip Hop performance art group who conduct participatory lectures, initiation workshops and immersive rituals. They act as a Cargo Cult, reconfiguring specific cultural debris and 'sports///ware' into exoskeletal armour and ceremonial props, used in performance rituals referencing strands of Hip Hop history, pyschogeography, elements of cyberpunk and the Gothic Futurism theory of the late rapper/ graffiti art philosopher, performance artist RAMMELLZEE. The Book Of Bitumen is a residue record from the Cults live street performance rituals conducted at dystopic locations such as The Westway, The Heygate estate, Slough bus terminus, an abandoned Lido in Margate, and the Teufelsberg Radomes, a cold war spy station in Berlin.
Installation Views
Biographies
About Zavier Ellis

Zavier read History of Modern Art at Manchester University before undertaking a Masters in Fine Art at City & Guilds of London Art School. He has lived and worked in London since 1998. Zavier has exhibited globally alongside contemporary and 20th century luminaries including Peter Blake, Marcus Harvey, Damien Hirst, Robert Rauschenberg, Neal Tait, Antoni Tàpies and Mark Titchner. Recent exhibitions include Museum der Moderne in Salzburg, Torrance Art Museum in California and Paul Stolper Gallery in London. His work is featured in many private collections including the world renowned Peter Nobel Collection, Zurich. Zavier is also a high profile gallerist, curator and publisher.
About Hilde Krohn Huse

Hilde Krohn Huse was born in Norway but lives and works in London, UK. Krohn Huse works within the field of narratives; editing, manipulating, twisting and skewing information and narrative content to control the viewers perceptions while also making them aware of the process. Krohn Huse’s content usually consists of found material which then comes together in films or collages or text to create an entirely new narrative. Krohn Huse also creates filmed performances which play with the honesty of performance and the deceptive qualities of modern film, creating a conflict with the integrity of the performance.
About Monica Ursina Jäger

Monica Ursina Jäger (born 1974) is a Swiss artist who gained her MA Fine Art at Goldsmiths College and lives and 
works in 
London and Zurich. She has participated in important group shows and exhibited widely throughout Europe 
and beyond. Recent exhibition venues include the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Haus Konstruktiv Zurich, Kunstmuseum 
Thun, Essl Museum - Kunst der 
Gegenwart, Arroniz Arte Contemporaneo, Mexico and Galeria Pilar, Sao Paulo among others. Her work is part of many private and public collections.
About Chris Jones

Chris Jones (born 1975 in Preston, UK) lives and works in London and NYC. Forthcoming group show, Asymmetric Dance Class at VITRINE Bermondsey, London (2014). Recent solo exhibitions include: MARC STRAUS, New York, NY (forthcoming), The Engine Room, Preston Bus Station, Preston (2013), Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art, Peekskill, NY. Group shows include: ‘The Order of Things’,  Charlie Smith Gallery, London (2013), ‘The Body Metonymic, Oakland University Art Gallery, Rochester MI (2013), ‘New Sensations’ and ‘The Future Can Wait’, The Saatchi Gallery and Channel 4, B1, Victoria House, London, England (2013), ‘The First Cut: Paper at the Cutting Edge’ Manchester Art Gallery, Manchester, England.
About Alex Gene Morrison

Alex Gene Morrison was born in Birmingham in 1975. He studied painting at the Royal College of Art between 2000-2002. After leaving the RCA he was one of the founders of the Rockwell Gallery and Studios in Dalston, London 2002-2007. Morrison works predominantly with painting and video/animation. He had a solo show at Stella Vine's Gallery Rosy Wilde in 2004. He has had solo shows at Rockwell Gallery, London, in 2006 at The Fishmarket Gallery, Northampton, in 2007, Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff, in 2008 and CHARLIE SMITH LONDON in 2010. His painting was exhibited in the John Moores Painting Prize in Liverpool in 2009. Morrison's work has been shown internationally, from New York to Tokyo. 
About Mitra Saboury

Mitra Saboury completed an MFA at Goldsmiths (2013), and a BS in neuroscience at the University of Pittsburgh (2010). Recent solo exhibitions include Touch Everything, Smart Objects, Los Angeles, 2015. Group exhibitions include The London Open, Whitechapel Gallery, 2015; The Future Can Wait, Victoria House, 2014; Jealous Graduate Award, Saatchi Gallery, 2014; Dance like Nobody’s Watching, Rhubaba Gallery, 2014. Saboury was awarded the 18th International Open Prize at Woman Made Gallery 2015, International Women’s Erotic Art Prize 2014, MAstars Axisweb award 2013, and featured in Edward Lucie-Smith and Zavier Ellis’ 100 London Artists in 2014. Future solo exhibitions include Chin's Push, Los Angeles, 2016, and Grand Union, Birmingham, 2016.
About Zhu Tian

Zhu Tian completed her Masters at The Royal College of Art, graduating in 2014. She won the Caitlin Art Prize in 2015 anfd the Broomhill National Sculpture prize in 2014.