Mat Collishaw – Innercity Inhalers

Mat Collishaw - Innercity Inhalers, 2012Other Criteria (New Bond Street) will exhibit new works by Mat Collishaw, 19 September – 23 October 2012, including a delicate edition of Murana glass water pipes and a series of photographic prints on goatskin parchment, extending Collishaw’s previous series titled ‘Last Meal on Death Row’. Collishaw’s glass sculptures, the ‘Innercity Inhalers’, are replicas of plastic smoking bongs used by improvising hedonists the world over. Debased interpretations of Marcel Duchamp’s ‘Air de Paris’, these works address the polluting, but also mind expanding effects of inner city air.  One does not have to light the bong in order to get the desired effect – the visual distortion taking place when looking through the translucently coloured and partially melted bongs is a sensation not dissimilar to the perceptual disorientation of the drug smoker.

The ‘Last Meal on Death Row’ prints depict carefully arranged still-lives of the meals chosen by American death row prisoners on the last day before their execution.

For the series, Collishaw restated a number of – often intriguing – last suppers and arranged them in the style of 17th century Vanitas paintings, a manner traditionally used to reflect on the transience of life, the futility of pleasure, and the certainty of death.

These limited Mat Collishaw editions will be available at Other Criteria (business stopped)