Output details

Cast

Voss was invited to present a solo exhibition at Dilston Grove, London by CGP Dilston Grove and Robin Klassnik, Director of Matt’s Gallery, London, who jointly hosted the show (September-October 2012). Dilston Grove is used for large-scale installations and performances by prestigious artists and has previously hosted work by Mike Nelson, Brian Catling and Professor Juan Cruz. The exhibition was supported financially by Arts Council England and Southwark Council.

In Cast, Voss explored his ongoing themes of layering and ambiguity to make a socio-political comment on modern British society. Dilston Grove, formerly Clare College Mission Church, was one of the first ferrocement concrete structures in this country. Now deconsecrated, the space is raw, dramatic and scarred. Voss did not attempt to alter the interior, but utilized its particularity, the pitted backdrop of the walls and the cavernous, yet dignified gloom, resting three sculptural figures specially produced for the exhibition and made from fabric, cast into hard forms, leant against the walls below the windows. The show’s title, Cast, commences a series of ambiguities, a cast of characters in a theatrical psychodrama, marooned yet tragi-comic, which are themselves cast. Cast adrift and cast off, they evoked bygone destitute figures from Victorian etchings and photographs who may have once sought help and sanctuary here, as well as contemporary economic victims. A large tilted canvas printed with a mis-registered but spatially convincing image of a bourgeois turn-of-the-century interior with an imperial staircase rested against the end wall blocking the usual entrance and exit, offering the illusory promise of a way up and a way out, but also juxtaposing luxury with decline and destitution.

The exhibition was reviewed by Martin Herbert for Art Monthly, no. 361 (Nov, 2012).