Wandering Fortress

McBride Contemporain is delighted to present Rebecca Munce’s first solo exhibition at the gallery, Wandering Fortress. Comprising all new ceramic sculptures and drawings, this body of work enlarges and deepens the artist’s world of symbols and pictographs, hybridized mythopoetic fictions, and private world of intensely imagined fantasy. An expanding sense of the serious spiritual potentiality of her work informs this show, in which she manages and incorporates the grotesque humour and campy playfulness of her previous production, adding a powerful sense of menacing wonderment to the mix. Munce creates glyphs and icon-like scenes, corralling myths and legends, casting new artistic spells with them.

The artist arrives at the unique atmosphere her work generates by a combination of techniques that approach fabrication and finish via both skilled, sophisticated, and cruder, “de-skilled” avenues. This process mirrors and augments the nature or her imagery, which juxtaposes the thoughtfully researched and clearly adult themes that are present, with childlike passages and “naive” and “bad” stylistic tropes, resulting in a challenging and oddly beautiful experience. She allows for both a visual and emotional rawness to remain, without entirely editing it out or covering it up, in both the drawings and sculptures. In Wandering Fortress, which as a phrase is a kind of suggestively absurd and yet magical formulation in itself, Munce has achieved a strong new coherence in her art, focusing the influences and ideas she has worked with for years into something rich and strange.